Preamble

The House met at half-past Two o'clock

PRAYERS

[Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair]

Oral Answers to Questions — EMPLOYMENT

Trade Union Leaders (Meetings)

Mr. Thomas Cox: asked the Secretary of State for Employment if he will list the leaders of trade unions he has met officially since taking up his present office.

Mr. Tom King: asked the Secretary of State for Employment how many meetings he has had with leaders of trade unions since taking office.

The Secretary of State for Employment (Mr. William Whitelaw): I have already had a large number of meetings with trade union leaders but I do not think it would be right to detail them all.

Mr. Cox: I s the right hon. Gentleman aware from these meetings that many trade union leaders and members find it unbelievable that men have to work seven days a week to get a decent wage and that the moment they stop doing so industry grinds to a halt? Is he further aware that the Government cling like drowning men to the remnants of stage 3, as a result of which the worsening industrial relations are costing the country hundreds of millions of pounds a year? How much more destruction will the Government cause?

Mr. Whitelaw: I do not accept the hon. Gentleman's first point. On his second point, I ask him and the House to reflect on the offer which has already been made to the National Union of Mineworkers, to which he refers. That offer in itself shows that the miners are recognised as a special case. It gives them a position which cannot be eroded under the proposals by

other unions seeking to catch up. This is a very important position and one which Labour Members should recognise.

Mr. King: I welcome the number of meetings which my right hon. Friend has already had with trade union leaders. May I urge him to meet the widest possible cross-section of union leadership, not merely of unions at present in dispute but of all unions, and particularly the officers of unions throughout the country, at different levels?

Mr. Whitelaw: I have met leaders of unions which are not involved in disputes, and I will continue to do so. I am only too pleased to discuss all the problems which those unions face. It is perfectly proper and right for me to do so. But I maintain the position which I put to the hon. Member for Wandsworth, Central (Mr. Thomas Cox).

Mr. Prentice: Does not the right hon. Gentleman agree that the Government had a historic opportunity yesterday? It is a great tragedy that they threw it away. What was the point of meeting trade union leaders except to seek their co-operation, particularly towards a constructive and restrained atmosphere for finding a way out of the present crisis? After the TUC leaders had gone as far as they constitutionally could in order to meet the Government, why were they turned down? Does not that leave the impression in the country that all those meetings were nothing more than a public relations exercise? [An HON. MEMBER: "By whom?"]

Mr. Whitelaw: Not at all. There is no question of anyone being turned down as the right hon. Gentleman suggests. Nor is there any question of not considering very carefully what was said. I hope I made it very clear to the Press and to the country, on television last night, that I regarded the offer made by the TUC as a genuine offer and as an effort from its point of view to seek to solve a difficult problem. Equally, the Government must state the facts for the nation, namely, that they are standing by a counter-inflation policy which, in the current circumstances facing the country, is of vital importance to us all. To take any action that would go back on that, unless one was very sure about it, would be a disaster, because it would inflict grave hardship on our country and on


jobs for our people in the longer term. These are problems which we must face and examine carefully in considering all the proposals. The Government realised that the TUC had put forward a genuine offer, but we did not believe that it would in itself meet the requirements of a successful counter-inflation policy.

Mr. Prentice: I f that is so, what was the meaning of the right hon. Gentleman's statement to the House in the debate just before Christmas, when he asked that the TUC should make it clear that if the miners were treated as a special case it would not be used as a precedent for other cases? Has not the TUC met the right hon. Gentleman's point? If the right hon. Gentleman meant something more in December, will he say what it was and what else he expects from the TUC?

Mr. Whitelaw: Will the right hon. Gentleman, who is always fair in these matters, read the whole of what I said? He has referred to only one part of my statement. I do not have the statement before me, but I said in another part that, if there were to be more for one group of workers, leaders of other groups would have to accept that their members would need to take substantially less. That was what I said before I made the other comment to which the right hon. Gentleman has referred.

Mr. Russell Kerr: Disgraceful, Willie!

Mr. Whitelaw: I f the hon. Gentleman thinks it is disgraceful he had better read the full quotation, which I quoted again last Thursday. I did say that. The hon. Gentleman can check it.

Sir P. Bryan: Last night's meeting was obviously particularly important. Will my right hon. Friend confirm that it was only one of a very long succession of meetings between the Government and the trade unions and that no Government, and in particular no Prime Minister, have made such efforts to keep in touch with and consult trade unions as have the present Government and Prime Minister?

Mr. Whitelaw: No one can deny the facts my hon. Friend has stated. They are absolutely true and are much to the credit of the Government.

Disabled Persons (Leicester)

Mr. Greville Janner: asked the Secretary of State for Employment whether he will take steps to promote employment in the Leicester area for disabled young people.

The Under-Secretary of State for Employment (Mr. Nicholas Scott): Careers officers of the youth employment service in Leicester, as in other areas, are responsible for helping disabled young people to secure employment and can call on a wide range of facilities and support.

Mr. Janner: I s the Minister aware that, despite the ability of the disablement officers to call on others for help, it remains extremely difficult to place disabled people in work, particularly if they are suffering from multiple disablements? Is he also aware that happily, thanks to medical science, many more seriously disabled people are living longer? What do the Government propose to do to help such people to have a dignified and useful life?

Mr. Scott: Perhaps I should make it clear that the latest statistics show that there are no registered disabled young people unemployed in the Leicester area. In spite of that, however, representatives of the local authority and Remploy have recently co-operated in a survey of sheltered facilities in the Leicester area, and meetings will be taking place to consider the results of that investigation.

Industrial Relations Act

Mr. Skinner: asked the Secretary of State for Employment whether he now proposes to seek to repeal the Industrial Relations Act.

Mr. Golding: asked the Secretary of State for Employment whether he will now seek to repeal the Industrial Relations Act.

Mr. Whitelaw: No, Sir, but I repeat that I am willing to examine carefully any constructive suggestions for improving the operation of the Act.

Mr. Skinner: I am not so sure that the trade union movement would want to


make any further constructive suggestions about amendments in view of what happened last night and the way in which the Government were not satisfied with the pound of flesh, which is more than I would give. They wanted blood instead. [An hon. Member: "Get on with the question".] I will get around to it.
There is plenty of time—until July 1975. Is the Secretary of State aware that the Act was introduced, according to the Government, to create industrial harmony and to bring sweetness and light into relations between management and unions? If that is so, why have not the Government used the Act to solve the present industrial impasse?

Mr. Whitelaw: The hon. Gentleman has not been the foremost in producing sweetness and light into the proceedings of the House. However that may be, one must face the facts about the Act. The hon. Gentleman and others who take his view regard everything to do with the Act as wrong. One must consider some of the things that are not wrong and that he would not think were wrong. For example, there are the provisions about unfair dismissal. The hon. Gentleman must accept how much they have been used to the benefit of many union members.

Mr. Fell: Does my right hon. Friend recall that time after time my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has invited the trade unions—[An Hon. Member: "Question."] This is a question. Has not my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister time after time invited the trade unions—the TUC—to put forward suggestions for improving the Act? Exactly how has the TUC reacted? What suggestions has it made?

Mr. Russell Kerr: They are on the record. Why does not the hon. Gentleman read the documents?

Mr. Whitelaw: There has been a widespread demand from both the Labour Party and the TUC that the Act should be totally repealed. That is their position, and I understand it. But I do not believe that in the long run it is a tenable position, because there are many parts of the Act that all hon. Members want to see preserved.

Mr. Golding: Why does the right hon. Gentleman speak with so little conviction on this subject? Why are the Government being so pig-headed? Why do they persist in their policy of confrontation, which is bringing us all to disaster?

Mr. Whitelaw: I do not see how those comments arise from the Question. The hon. Gentleman says that I have been pig-headed. Many other things are attributed to me, but I have very seldom heard that said of me. I do not believe that these questions arise on the Industrial Relations Act. We have adopted a thoroughly reasonable, fair and sensible position as regards particularly the miners' industrial dispute and all the other matters, and we stand by it.

Mr. Tebbit: Would my right hon Friend need something more than a solemn and binding undertaking or statement of intent before the Government withdrew the Act?

Mr. Whitelaw: We have made it perfectly clear that we have no intention of withdrawing the Act. We have said plainly that we are prepared to amend those parts of it which the results of their working have shown it would be right to amend. The Labour Party says that it wishes to repeal the whole Act. It would throw out many things that it specifically wants if it did so.

Mr. Ashton: As the Government and their supporters consistently make statements that the miners are led by a small group of mindless militants and Communists, why have not the Government used the Act to conduct a ballot of miners to see whether they would accept phase 3?

Mr. Whitelaw: The hon. Gentleman impugns my motives in a totally unfair way.

Mr. Prentice: The right hon. Gentleman keeps repeating what other Ministers have kept repeating: that there is a contradiction in our position. Therefore, I wish to make it clear to him that appeals against unfair dismissal were the policy of the Labour Government and always have been our policy. We will continue with those appeals and improve the provisions. Otherwise, we intend the total repeal of the Act. We have made


it clear over and over again that the choice before the people in the General Election, when it comes, is therefore either the repeal of the Act and a new deal under a Labour Government or continuing with the Act and other policies which have produced the worst system of industrial relations since the 1920s.

Mr. Whitelaw: I do not accept all that the right hon. Gentleman says. I am sure that he, like everyone else, will wish to be very careful. If he says that the only parts of the Act he would retain are the unfair dismissal provisions, I wonder whether that is the position his party would take.

Mr. Walter Johnson: asked the Secretary of State for Employment if he will now review the working of the Industrial Relations Act with particular reference to the income tax position of those unions which have deregistered under the Act and to the fact that such unions are not permitted to negotiate union shop agreements.

Mr. Whitelaw: I will take these and other suggestions into account in considering possible amendments to the Act.

Mr. Johnson: I s the Minister aware that to make this suggested amendment to the Industrial Relations Act would at once improve the relationship between the Government and the unions? Surely that is a small price to pay. Will he look again at the matter? The unions regard this aspect of the Act as being mean, petty and spiteful.

Mr. Whitelaw: I am perfectly prepared to consider this proposal. I am not sure whether the hon. Member is correct because there are those who, understandably from their point of view, still demand the total repeal of the Act. Nevertheless, I take the hon. Member's point and I shall consider it carefully.

Mr. Geoffrey Finsberg: When my right hon. Friend considers any amendments will he consider making compulsory a secret ballot for the election of union officers to be conducted in the same impartial way as the elections conducted by the electricians' trade union?

Mr. Whitelaw: Obviously it is correct to consider all these proposals when examining possible amendments to the Act.

Mr. English: I s the Secretary of State aware that large firms in industry make no use of the Act and that they, as well as the trade unions, would seek its amendment? When does he propose to bring firm proposals before the House?

Mr. Whitelaw: I note the hon. Member's comment, but he must remember that a great deal of use is being made of the Act. Many cases have been settled by voluntary agreement before coming to the Industrial Relations Court and a great deal of work has been done on industrial relations which is of considerable value. The hon. Member and his hon. Friends cannot get away from that fact.

Mr. William Hamilton: asked the Secretary of State for Employment what recent talks he has had with representatives of the TUC on proposed amendments to the Industrial Relations Act.

Mr. Whitelaw: I have had discussions with representatives of the TUC on a number of economic and industrial matters. The Industrial Relations Act has been touched on in our talks, but I have not discussed particular proposals for amendment.

Mr. Hamilton: Why does not the right hon. Gentleman take an initiative in this matter, particularly since Sir John Donaldson has said that the Act needs amending? Surely that would be a step in the process towards reconciliation, about which the Government are particularly fond of speaking. Is it not the case that the Government themselves are not using the Act? Will the right hon. Gentleman say which will come first, repeal of the Act or a General Election?

Mr. Whitelaw: I have never proposed, nor has any of my right hon. Friends, that we should repeal the Act. We have consistently said that there are many parts of the Act, large portions of it, which are accepted to be of value by large numbers of people. The hon. Member asked what talks I have had on this matter. In the talks that I have held many people have said they want the Act repealed. Therefore, I have said that I am considering various amendments and proposals for amendments which have been put to me.

Sir P. Bryan: Why does not the hon Member for Fife, West (Mr. William


Hamilton) take an initiative and make his own specific suggestions? Has my right hon. Friend noticed that Question No. 5 today was the first specific suggestion we have had from the Labour side for an amendment to the Industrial Relations Act?

Mr. Whitelaw: My hon. Friend the Member for Howden (Sir P. Bryan) has considerable experience in these matters. [HON. MEMBERS: "He was sacked."] A great many demands have been made for total repeal of the Act. I regard them as unrealistic and I agree that few constructive amendments have ever been put forward.

Mr. Heffer: I s it not the case that, during the passage of the Bill, the Opposition put forward a whole series of amendments, including those put forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Derby, South (Mr. Walter Johnson)? During the course of the Bill the Government on no occasion accepted any of the arguments in spite of being warned that, if the legislation went through unamended, it would create more industrial relations problems and would prove to be a great albatross round the Government's neck. Is it not time that the Government learned from the experience of hon. Members who have worked in industry for a long time and who know that the Act must be got rid of at the earliest possible moment, but that in the meantime it should be amended to ease the position?

Mr. Whitelaw: The hon. Member speaks in contradictory terms. He says that those with experience believe that the Act should be got rid of altogether. I do not believe that that is the hon. Member's position. He says that there should be amendments in the short term. The Government have said that they are prepared to consider and, indeed, are considering amendments. It cannot be consistent to speak on the one hand about total repeal and on the other hand about amendments.

Motor Industry

Mr. Dalyell: asked the Secretary of State for Employment if he will make a statement about short-time working in the motor industry.

The Minister of State, Department of Employment (Mr. R. Chichester-Clark): The motor industry is operating a threeday

working week except where continuous process operations are involved or a firm has reached some special arrangement with the Department of Trade and Industry and the appropriate electricity board for a full working week but with electricity usage restricted to 65 per cent. of normal requirements.

Mr. Dalyell: What do the Government propose to do about the shortage of steel in the motor industry? Is the Minister aware that at the huge Leyland plant at Bathgate in West Lothian there are many, not only ex-miners, now working in the motor industry who think that, in not following the line offered by the TUC, the Government, in dealing with the miners, must be off their collective nut?

Mr. Chichester-Clark: The serious steel situation was discussed over and over again in the House last week. I understand that the British Leyland truck factory in the hon. Gentleman's constituency is operating a three-day week from Monday to Wednesday and that about 3,500 workers are on short time and are receiving lay-off pay for the remaining days under an agreement with the firm. The guaranteed week provisions will operate when lay-off pay expires.

Mr. Buchan: I s not the Minister aware that one of the problems facing the motor car industry is in assembly? A hold-up in any other sector throughout Britain can hold up the entire industry. Does he not agree that that is extremely serious to our whole export position? Will he take it from me that the members of the two main unions involved in the industry in Scotland, as elsewhere in Britain—the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers and the Transport and General Workers Union—cannot understand the Government's refusal of the offer made by Hugh Scanlon and others, except by putting it down to the incredible rigidity, stupidity and vicious-ness of the Prime Minister?

Mr. Chichester-Clark: I do not accept a single word of what the hon. Gentleman has said. He knows, as does everyone in the House who has listened to the debates and observed all that has gone on over the past few weeks, why the three-day week came about. I do not propose to add to that.

Immigrants (Birmingham)

Mr. Sydney Chapman: asked the Secretary of State for Employment what is his estimate of the proportion of those currently registered as unemployed in the Birmingham travel-to-work area who are immigrants ; and how this compares with the proportion of immigrants in the total working population in the same area.

Mr. Scott: On 12th November 1973, 10 per cent. of the registered unemployed in the Birmingham travel-to-work area were coloured immigrants. I regret that up-to-date information about the proportion of immigrants in the working population in local areas is not available.

Mr. Chapman: May I congratulate my hon. Friend on his new appointment? I welcome the fact that these figures do not seem disproportionate to the total immigrant working population, but will he look carefully at the matter and watch the situation? I am sure he will agree, as did his predecessor, that it is of vital importance to good relations in a city such as Birmingham.

Mr. Scott: The national picture over the last 12 months up to last November was that, in general, coloured unemployment as a percentage of total unemployment was falling but I share my hon. Friend's concern to see that real equality of opportunity is achieved.

Mr. Harold Walker: May I, too, join in congratulating the hon. Gentleman on his first appearance at the Dispatch Box? I hope he will accept it in the right spirit if I say that I do not think he will be occupying that position for very long.
I think I have today heard the phrase "coloured immigrant" used for the first time at the Dispatch Box by a Minister from the hon. Gentleman's Department. Will he say by what criteria his Department determines whether an immigrant is coloured or otherwise?

Mr. Scott: This is an assessment made by the Department of the circumstances at each of the local offices.

Small Firms

Mr. David Steel: asked the Secretary of State for Employment what advice is being issued, from his Department to

small firms which are being forced to lay off workers due to the present economic situation.

Mr. Chichester-Clark: My Department stands ready to advise small firms and their employees in the present emergency situation, and any employer consulting one of the small firms centres set up by the Department of Trade and Industry to advise small firms on sources of information will be referred to us on matters for which my Department is responsible.

Mr. Steel: Does the Minister accept that, while the three-day working week is drastic for the whole of industry, its effects are particularly serious for small businesses? For some of these businesses the effects may be permanent. What steps is his Department or any other Department prepared to take to protect small businesses which may not survive?

Mr. Chichester-Clark: The best way to protect the interests of small businesses is for the overtime ban in the mines to come to an end. [Interruption.] That is the case and it is widely recognised on both sides of the House. In the meantime, if my Department can assist the hon. Member in any way with a particular problem which exists in his constituency, we shall be only too glad to do so.

Sir J. Rodgers: Short of common sense prevailing and the overtime ban being lifted, are the Government considering any mechanism for a court of appeal for changing the three days allocated for working, either to rotate them or switch them to other days?

Mr. Chichester-Clark: This matter is under consideration.

Mr. Joel Barnett: Will the Minister inform his right hon. Friend that he should take more notice of the small businesses than of the CBI, which is not particularly representative in that direction? Will he pay more attention to what is to happen to small businesses which find their cash flow seriously affected? How much longer does he expect they will be able to manage without going bust in wholesale numbers?

Mr. Chichester-Clark: My right hon. Friend is well aware of the difficulties of the small business men in these matters. I understand today that he has had three meetings with representatives of small business men.

Pay Settlements

Mr. Geoffrey Finsberg: asked the Secretary of State for Employment how many pay settlements within phase 3 have been settled up to the latest convenient date ; and how many workers have been covered by such settlements.

Mr. Chichester-Clark: At December 31st, 1973, 657 settlements covering nearly 4 million employees had been received by the Pay Board under the provisions of stage 3.

Mr. Finsberg: Does my hon. Friend not agree that, in the light of these figures, it would be monstrously unfair to those millions of workers who have accepted an agreement under phase 3 to permit the miners to settle outside phase 3?

Mr. Chichester-Clark: Yes.

Mr. Ewing: I s the hon. Gentleman aware that some of the settlements within phase 3 have been achieved in a peculiar manner? Is he aware of the settlements that have been reached in the contract cleaning industry, where many of the women employees are widows? Is he aware that their wage settlement is geared to the wage restrictions relating to national insurance contributions rather than to the need for an increase even within phase 3? Will the hon. Gentleman consider that?

Mr. Chichester-Clark: I f the hon. Gentleman cares to table a Question on that matter, I shall do everything within my power to seek to answer it. There is no evidence to suggest that there has been any serious evasion of the code.

Sheltered Employment

Mr. Tebbit: asked the Secretary of State for Employment what representations he has received on his consultative document "Sheltered Employment for Disabled People".

Mr. Scott: The consultative document was published on 12th December. My right hon. Friend has already begun to receive some comments of interest.

Mr. Tebbit: I add my congratulations to my hon. Friend on his new position. Will he guide the House on how soon we might expect any action as a result of these proposals in the consultations which are now taking place?

Mr. Scott: As my hon. Friend knows, this is part of a review of our whole policy and approach to the treatment of the disabled. I cannot yet give a firm date, but we are giving high priority to the review.

Mr. Pavitt: Has the hon. Gentleman gone further with representations made about this document by the National League of the Blind? If he has, will he write in due course to let me know whether such representations have been acceded to?

Mr. Scott: We are considering all the representations which have been made. I shall keep the hon. Gentleman informed.

Mr. Harold Walker: May I remind the hon. Gentleman, as I reminded his predecessor on many occasions, that according to the figures of his Department nearly 9,000 firms are in flagrant and deliberate breach of the law? What action will his Department take regarding the firms which ignore the quota system?

Mr. Scott: I think the hon. Gentleman will know from his experience in this Department that the interpretation of the quota arrangements has always been a matter of judgment. There have been few prosecutions. We are reviewing the whole question of our policies towards the disabled. It would be inappropriate now to alter present practice.

Wage Claims

Mr. Loveridge: asked the Secretary of State for Employment if he will now encourage the TUC and the CBI, and representatives of the nationalised industries, to hold discussions with a view to fixing an annual date for all major wage claims.

Mr. Chichester-Clark: Such a proposal would present considerable practical difficulties.

Mr. Loveridge: I appreciate what my hon. Friend says. Does he not agree that the leapfrogging of wage claims, which sometimes happens within the same industry, is a contributory cause of rising


prices, and that it is at least worth working towards an annual date for each industry?

Mr. Chichester-Clark: I understand my hon. Friend's point about leapfrogging. I am not sure that the synchonisation of terminal dates would necessarily bring an end to leapfrogging. There would undoubtedly be a high once-and-for-all cost in getting negotiators to accept differing lengths of agreement to bring all terminal dates into line.

Mr. Molloy: I f the hon. Gentleman finds difficulty in raising the points enumerated by the TUC and the CBI, may I ask whether he is prepared to discuss with those bodies what should be done to prohibit the actions of asset strippers such as Slater Walker, which has threatened firms in my constituency with take-over bids to such an extent that factories have been closed and hundreds of men have been thrown out of work? Does he realise that the land has been sold so as to ward off take-over bids? Is he aware that this has happened in the glass container industry, which is overloaded with orders and cannot meet either its domestic or export orders? Is the hon. Gentleman prepared to consider that example of industrial behaviour?

Mr. Chichester-Clark: I do not comment on the example given by the hon. Gentleman. I am bound to say that few hon. Members could accuse the Government of being unwilling to discuss any matter with the TUC or the CBI. Neither the TUC nor the CBI has expressed any interest in the idea of a common date.

Mr. Fell: I s my hon. Friend aware that it utterly impossible for the country to evisage with any equanimity an annual rise of approximately 10 per cent? Will he kindly consider when it became the fashion for all wage-earners to demand an annual rise as opposed to a rise when they really need one?

Mr. Chichester-Clark: That question might provide me with some interesting historical research. I am not sure whether I am prepared to carry it out at this moment.

County Durham

Mr. Dormand: asked the Secretary of State for Employment if he will pay an official visit to County Durham.

Mr. Whitelaw: I have no plans to do so.

Mr. Dormand: That is a pity. Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that unemployment in County Durham is now nearly twice the national average? Is he further aware of the continuing emigration of people from the county and the limited job opportunities which are available for school leavers? Has he seen the recently-published report of Durham County Council which warns that all these things are likely to continue? Is it not time that the Government did something about the failure of their policies for the North-East?

Mr. Whitelaw: As the hon. Gentleman knows, I am a Member for the North of England, although I represent a Northwest constituency rather than a constituency in the North-East. However, I still have close conections with the North-East and I have frequently been there. I understand its problems. Let us not forget what was achieved following the plans which were laid by my right hon. and noble Friend the present Lord Chancellor when he visited the North-East. The North-East has benefited to a considerable extent ever since.

Mr. Wilkinson: I f my right hon. Friend has not the time to at present to visit County Durham, will he visit the assisted area of Yorkshire and Humberside, where he will find that the Government's regional policies have been a marked success, and where in the West Riding, and especially Bradford, unemployment before the present go-slow in the mining industry was below the national average? Is my right hon. Friend aware that in the textile industry the co-operation between management and employees was outstanding and was recognised since special provisions have been made for the firms which work seven days a week?

Mr. Whitelaw: My hon. Friend states facts which no one can dispute and which are to the credit of the area concerned.

Mr. Robert C. Brown.: When the right hon. Gentleman finally decides to pay a visit to Durham, will he travel via Newcastle airport and Brandling Park, where he will see a monstrous three-level junction on the urban motorway with two spurs which will go nowhere unless he can persuade his right hon. and learned


Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment to give the necessary loan sanction for the North-West radial route and the coast road extension?

Mr. Whitelaw: I travelled to Newcastle airport on purely private affairs on New Year's Eve. I did not at that time visit the junction to which the hon. Gentleman refers. I shall consider what he says.

Temporarily Unemployed Persons

Sir P. Bryan: asked the Secretary of State for Employment what arrangements he has made to provide special training courses for those who may become temporarily unemployed due to fuel shortage in the coming year.

Mr. Chichester-Clark: None. Temporary unemployment does not lend itself easily to use for training.

Sir P. Bryan: Will my hon. Friend tell us to what extent Government training centres have been affected by the three-day week?

Mr. Chichester-Clark: I can tell my hon. Friend that the expansion of the training opportunity scheme is not seriously affected by the cuts announced by my right hon. Friend on 17th December. There will be a slight slowing-down in the expansion of training places for GTCs. The expansion in colleges of further education remains unaffected. I am glad to say that that applies to the target of 50,000 to 55,000 trainees for 1974, which I know my hon. Friend will agree is a massive increase.

Mr. Leonard: As the hon. Gentleman and all his ministerial colleagues are among those who will shortly be unemployed, will he make provisions for increasing the retraining facilities for unskilled workers?

Mr. Chichester-Clark: I shall always do everything within my power to help the hon. Gentleman when he needs it.

East Midlands and Kettering

Sir G. de Freitas: asked the Secretary of State for Employment approximately how many workers were without full-time employment in the East Midlands and in the Kettering parliamentary constituency, respectively, on the most recent date in 1974 for which he has figures ; and what proportion of these he

estimates can be attributed to the three-day week.

Mr. Scott: No figures of unemployment are yet available for any date in 1974. It is estimated that on Friday 11th January 1974 there were 88,000 in the East Midlands temporarily laid off and registered for unemployment benefit ; 5,000 were so registered at Kettering and Corby local offices, which cover most of the right hon. Member's constituency.

Sir G. de Freitas: Should there be a General Election, will the hon. Gentleman guarantee to do everything he possibly can to publish the latest figures showing the effect of the three-day week on my constituents who, until the three-day week was introduced, had been enjoying full employment?

Mr. Scott: Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman would be better advised to address that advice elsewhere.

Three-Day Week

Mr. Frank Allaun: asked the Secretary of State for Employment if he will make a statement on compulsory short-time working in industry and the three-day week.

Mr. Whitelaw: My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister explained the need for measures to restrict the supply of electricity to industry on 9th January and the three-day week was fully debated on the following day. At present I have nothing to add to what was said during those debates.

Mr. Allaun: Do not the Government's fuel figures show that the three-day week is unnecessary and a "con" trick aimed at putting people against the miners? Do not the figures show that there are eight or nine weeks' supplies of coal even before the safety margin is reached? Is not that position revealed today by reports from the men working in the power stations to the effect that those power stations are bulging with oil and coal? If the right hon. Gentleman says that there is a shortage of oil, can he say why no crude oil is being refined for the power stations but is going to motorists instead?

Mr. Whitelaw: The answer to the hon. Gentleman has been given consistently and frequently in all the debates that


have taken place on this subject. The answer is simple and easy. The measures that were taken were acts of common prudence to preserve our energy supplies during the particular problems we are facing this winter. There was nothing else beyond that. I believe that the majority of people who are not seeking to make some form of political capital understand that. I have no doubt that these facts are perfectly clear to all who seek to understand the situation.

Mr. Eadie: I s the right hon. Gentleman aware that our information in Scotland is that there is no embarrassing shortage of coal stocks at power stations and that there are more coal stocks at one of the power stations than there have been for many years, yet it has not turned a wheel for three or four days? Would he not agree, as there has been some talk from the Government Front Bench this afternoon about ballot votes, that he should consider holding a ballot vote among some of the small firms which employ half the workers of the country, asking them whether they agree with the Government's policy over the three-day week and fuel rationing?

Mr. Whitelaw: There cannot be any doubt in anyone's mind that, if it is possible to conserve our energy supplies so that we continue to preserve the life of our country and its business on a three-day week basis, it is better to do that than to advance into total chaos, which would be a negation of government and a disastrous thing for any Government to do.

Hotel Industry

Sir C. Taylor: asked the Secretary of State for Employment whether he has been informed about the shortage of staff in the hotel industry ; and whether he will increase the quota of trained, temporary foreign workers into this country.

Mr. Scott: The industry has made plain its concern about shortages of staff and my right hon. Friend has the needs of the industry in mind. I hope soon to discuss with the industry the allocation of the quota for this year.

Sir C. Taylor: Does my hon. Friend realise that my constituents provide holidays for the people who have been working

hard during the year? How are we to do this with present staff shortages in the industry?

Mr. Scott: A quota has to be seen as a total system of immigration control and not just as a means of labour supply. Efforts are being made to recruit and train British workers for the hotel industry. My Department will do all that it can to assist.

Oral Answers to Questions — ASLEF

Mr. Goodhart: asked the Secretary of State for Employment what discussions he has had with members of the executive committee of ASLEF.

Mr. Whitelaw: I met the executive of ASLEF on 11th December and made a full statement to the House on that day.

Mr. Goodhart: In any future contact with ASLEF, will my right hon. Friend make it absolutely plain that tens of thousands of frustrated rail passengers will be enraged if the Railways Board ever again pays engine drivers who refuse to drive trains?

Mr. Whitelaw: I do not wish to add anything to the present situation except to say that the British Railways Board has made a proposal that there should be a meeting of the railways national tribunal next week. This is to take place. I hope that it will yield results and that there will be an end to the present extremely unfortunate and, as I believe, totally unnecessary action.

Mr. John Grant: Does not the right hon. Gentleman think that he ought to use his good offices to try to bring that meeting forward a little? Does he realise that the travelling public will find it difficult to understand why there should be such a long delay? If the reason is that people have prior commitments, ought they not to revise their priorities?

Mr. Whitelaw: I do not know what the arrangements were between the British Railways Board and the unions concerned. I sincerely hope that the industrial action of all sorts will be called off. That surely would be a right and proper action and one which would suit rail passengers.

Oral Answers to Questions — GLC LEADER (MEETING)

Mr. Thomas Cox: asked the Prime Minister if he will make a statement on his official meeting with the Leader of the GLC.

The Prime Minister (Mr. Edward Heath): I met Sir Reginald Goodwin, who was accompanied by the Director-General of the GLC, at 10 Downing Street on 11th January. We had a useful and constructive discussion about the causes of the problems facing London and about ways of dealing with them. Sir Reginald Goodwin suggested that the Government and the GLC should undertake a joint assessment of the future staffing requirements of London's services. I welcomed this suggestion and said that I would consider how the GLC could collaborate with the work which is in progress within the Government.

Mr. Cox: While I note that reply, may I ask the Prime Minister, in view of the recent action by the Chancellor, whether he is aware that unless very generous help is given to the GLC and to other authorities throughout the country, the position will worsen? Is he aware that while in 1970 he pranced round the country claiming that he would create a one-nation society, the action which he and the Chancellor have been taking has divided the country more than anything else? Now, when the going is getting tough, does he intend to run away from the problems?

The Prime Minister: I cannot accept what the hon. Gentleman is saying. Those are not views which were put forward by Sir Reginald Goodwin. We discussed particular aspects of these problems, such as housing and ways in which the GLC and the Government were already acting to meet them. We also discussed some of the causes of the present difficulties, in particular the change in movement of the population in the Greater London area from the inner area to the outer area. This makes it extremely difficult for those who normally would be working in the public services to live close enough to their work. Neither of us thought that these were easy problems to solve, but we are to carry out a joint assessment of London's total requirements. Then we can see what further can be done to help.

Mr. William Clark: When my right hon. Friend met the Leader of the GLC, did he suggest that it would be much better for the GLC not to waste money buying rented properties around London? Did he suggest that it would be much better advised to spend money on developing the dockland so that we can produce new houses rather than gain extra utilisation from existing houses?

The Prime Minister: We discussed both of those things in some detail. My hon. Friend will realise that a different time phasing is connected with any action taken by the GLC, on, for example, rented property. I know that the present GLC administration—as was its predecessor—is keen to see dockland development going ahead as quickly as possible.

Mr. Spearing: The Prime Minister has rightly said that one of the problems is the provision of housing for those who provide London's services. Does he recall that a year ago his Minister of Housing refused to initiate an inquiry into the effects of the free market in land and property which flourishes in London, causing over 100 evictions in my constituency? If he now puts a shackle on the miners, preventing them from using their bargaining power, why will he not shackle those who exploit the land and property market in London?

The Prime Minister: This was not a question raised with me by Sir Reginald Goodwin. It was not an aspect to which he was asking the Government to address themselves. If the hon. Gentleman has a particular constituency problem, my right hon. Friend will of course be prepared to look at it.

Oral Answers to Questions — CBI AND TUC (MEETINGS)

Mr. Ewing: asked the Prime Minister what plans he has for further meetings with the TUC and CBI.

Mr. Skinner: asked the Prime Minister what further meetings he has planned with the CBI and TUC.

Mr. Meacher: asked the Prime Minister when he next proposes to meet the TUC and CBI.

Mr. Strang: asked the Prime Minister if he has any plans for further talks with representatives of the TUC and CBI.

The Prime Minister: I met representatives of the TUC on 10th January and again yesterday ; and representatives of the CBI on 11th January. At these meetings we discussed the industrial situation and the proposal which the TUC put forward at the NEDC meeting on 9th January. We agreed that the Government should continue to keep closely in touch with both the CBI and the TUC and further meetings will be arranged as necessary.

Mr. Ewing: Will the Prime Minister say what purpose he considers those further meetings will have, since on the most important economic decision that the Government have taken—namely, the three-day week—he did not even have the decency to consult the CBI or the TUC? Does not that confirm the view of his right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell) that the Prime Minister and his Government are politically immoral?

The Prime Minister: The purpose of any further meetings can be to make a further attempt to find a solution to the present industrial problems, which both the CBI and the TUC as well as the Government wish to do. I explained at NEDC the reason why there was not consultation over the three-day week and I have explained to the House. The Government did not wish to be in the position of being accused of threatening the National Union of Mineworkers' meeting on the Thursday morning.

Sir Gilbert Longden: I s not part of the trouble that many people do not appreciate the real danger which threatens the pounds and the pence in our pockets? Would it help if, instead of always referring to our "counter-inflation" policy, we were to remind the nation that the present Government are the first Government since the war to make a determined effort to prevent the arrival of the day when we shall need a suitcase instead of a notecase to carry our money?

The Prime Minister: I agree with my hon. Friend that this Government have made a determined attempt, in conjunction with the CBI and the TUC, to find an orderly way of settling differences which arise over incomes and in particular over wages. During stages 1 and 2 the work we did was very successful. As I have already said, in stage 3 nearly

4 million workers have already agreed settlements and to that extent stage 3 also is successful. My desire is that the miners should find themselves able to accept stage 3, in which they are being treated as a special case, and that they should accept the invitation open to them immediately stage 3 is settled to have a complete and detailed discussion with the National Coal Board—and the Government if they wish—about the future pay structure of the whole industry.

Mr. Skinner: Why did not the Prime Minister use his meeting with the TUC last night to end all the silly speculation about a February election? As he did not tell the TUC, will he tell me now?

The Prime Minister: Because in the five and a half hours of intensive discussion between the TUC and the Government both sides were trying to find a solution to this problem, and the question of an election was never mentioned.

Mr. Adley: Will my right hon. Friend confirm that the TUC has lifted its ban on members of the Communist Party holding office in unions affiliated to the TUC? Will he ask the TUC what was its object in so doing and whether it feels that this action has made a significant contribution to the improvement of industrial relations?

The Prime Minister: That has always been a matter for decision by individual unions through their own rule books. Therefore, if changes have been made in rule books they have been done by individual unions on their own decisions.

Mr. Meacher: As the alleged objective of the three-day week is to prevent wage inflation, is the Prime Minister aware that, on even the most absurdly pessimistic assumptions, a 50 per cent. increase in the rate of current pay settlements immediately for everyone for the whole of the next year would cost less than £2 billion, whereas the three-day working week, if it goes on until the spring, on the most conservative official NEDC assumptions, must cost at least £5 billion? Is not the imposition of the three-day week, therefore, a criminally irresponsible action?

The Prime Minister: As is so often the case, the hon. Gentleman has not realised what is at stake. The three-day week is


brought about by the shortage of coal for power stations.

Mr. Jennings: Will my right hon. Friend recognise that this is a friendly question which contains a warm invitation? Does he know that my birthday is 10th February? In his future programme of meetings, will he consider visiting one of the breweries in Burton to celebrate my birthday with me during the first half of February? If he cannot manage 10th February, can he manage either of two dates on which I am completely free—7th and 14th February?

The Prime Minister: I shall certainly try to oblige my hon. Friend. It is not very often that a Prime Minister has such an opportunity, and I would welcome it.

Mr. Strang: I s the Prime Minister aware that the farcical machinations of the Pay Board and the National Coal Board during the Christmas Recess regarding waiting time payments to miners and, now, the studied and prolonged so-called deliberation of the Government on the current TUC initiative are serving to convince more and more people that three-day working and industrial bitterness are being deliberately orchestrated by the Government in an attempt to create a political climate in which they can fight an election without defending their own disastrous economic record?

The Prime Minister: I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman on any of those points. The use of words such as "machinations" about the National Coal Board or the Pay Board will not help to find a solution. The Pay Board has been carrying out its duty under statute, and the National Coal Board is anxious to avoid industrial disruption and to find a settlement, as are the Government. On the three-day week, perhaps the hon. Gentleman—who treats these matters seriously—will address himself to the published figures which show the position of coal stocks in the past weeks.

Mr. Maude: Does my right hon. Friend agree that, while everyone in the country would like to be able to move towards a voluntary incomes policy, recent events and the discussions with the TUC seem to indicate that it is only within the safeguards of a statutory

incomes policy that we can hope to get a safe agreement on a voluntary basis?

The Prime Minister: Yes, Sir. I agree that my hon. Friend is right in present circumstances. I also think that it is right to continue to try to develop a voluntary policy. All sides recognise—the CBI, the TUC and the Government, who have taken part in the talks over the last 18 months—that there must be very clear assurances and undertakings with a voluntary policy, whether on the side of wages or on the side of prices, and that the two go together to form a completely voluntary policy. All those—now nearly 4 million—who have made agreements under stage 3 have done so in the genuine belief that this is a fair and orderly process with which others will comply. That is the basis on which they have made their agreements, and rightly so.

Mr. Harold Wilson: Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that it is a fair interpretation of what he said this afternoon and of what the Secretary of State for Employment said in his public Press briefings last night that the outcome of the meeting yesterday between the Government and the TUC is still a matter for consideration by both sides and that the ball is still in play? Does he agree that no one who is in a position to have a determinate effect on this grave situation should at this time make the situation more difficult on the eve of this important all-union/TUC conference? In that spirit, will the right hon. Gentleman agree, after that conference is held, to meet the TUC committee that he has been meeting?

The Prime Minister: As I said in my statement, further meetings will be arranged as necessary. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Employment made plain last night in the conference to which the right hon. Gentleman referred, we regarded the meeting as adjourned, and that also is the view of the General Secretary of the TUC. Therefore, the right hon. Gentleman receives the assurance for which he asks.

Sir P. Bryan: Does my right hon. Friend agree that it would be just as irresponsible for the Government to accept at once and without deep consideration the TUC assurance as a short cut out of our industrial trouble as it would be to reject it out of hand?

The Prime Minister: That is the reason why we have been having the three sets of talks, two with the TUC and one with the CBI. Everybody agrees that one must be clear about the assurance. The assurance so far quoted means that if the miners are to be considered as a special case—and the Government already consider them to be a special case and have shown so in stage 3—the other unions will not quote that in any wage negotiations. But the assurance does not say that other unions would be prepared to accept stage 3, nor does it say that other unions would refuse to use industrial action—which in some cases would be just as serious as that which is being suffered by the country at the moment.

Mr. Barnes: I s it not the case, despite what the Prime Minister and my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition say, that the five and a half hours of talks were a sort of pre-election ballet, and a rather long one? Is it not the case that anybody who knows anything about politics knows that the Prime Minister is seeking an election now only to avoid fighting on his record? Why do we have to wait until Thursday?

The Prime Minister: I s not the hon. Gentleman doing less than credit to the intelligence and integrity of the six members of the TUC who took part in the talks? Is he suggesting that they would be prepared to take part in a ballet for the purposes he describes? The fact is that these talks were genuine and were acknowledged by both sides to be so.

Mr. Fell: May I again raise with my right hon. Friend a bone of contention, which has been raised several times this afternoon, concerning the Industrial Relations Act? Does he recall that on many occasions he has invited the TUC specifically to put forward proposals for changing the Industrial Relations Act which would help the unions? Will he say what recommendations, if any, have been put forward by the TUC for amendment of the Act?

The Prime Minister: My hon. Friend is correct to say that I have constantly said at meetings with employers as well as trade unionists that the Government will consider any recommendations which they wish to make for amendment of the Act. I have always added that these recommendations would carry much greater weight if they came from people

who have been genuinely working the Act. Nevertheless, I said that we would consider any suggested amendments to the Act, and I believe that there is sufficient confidence within the three sides to recognise that this is a genuine offer. It is true to say, however, that neither employers nor trade unionists have put forword in the talks any proposals for amendment of the Act. But the offer still remains open.

Mr. Palmer: On the three-day working week, will the Prime Minister answer a question which has not been put to him before: how far was properly organised load-shedding considered as an alternative to the three-day working week?

The Prime Minister: I know that the hon. Member for Bristol, Central (Mr. Palmer) has very specialised knowledge of these matters, and I can tell him that this was considered very fully indeed. Although there was no direct consultation the day before the decision was announced in Parliament, there has been consultation with industry over a considerable time on the best way to handle industry when, for one reason or another, complete power supplies are not available. We based our decisions on the general knowledge we had of its views.

Mr. Thorpe: Will the Prime Minister confirm that the Government attach importance to the report of the Pay Board on relativities which is expected at the end of the month? Does he agree that the recognition by the TUC that the miners were a special case is in itself a useful contribution to the discussion on relativities? On the basis that we assume the Prime Minister is more anxious to get an agreed incomes policy than a General Election, will he agree that any Government which failed to do everything they could to conciliate and which preferred confrontation at the polls would deserve the contempt of the electorate?

The Prime Minister: I agree with the right hon. Gentleman that everything possible should be done to conciliate, and this is the case. This has been done within the context of the counter-inflation policy in stage 3. If the right hon. Gentleman considers the number of meetings which have been held and the generosity of the offer to the miners—because they are a special case and there has been widespread approval throughout the country


that they are a special case—he will agree that we have proved that point. On relativities, as I said last week to the right hon. Lady the Member for Blackburn (Mrs. Castle), it is not the fault of the Government that the report has been delayed because of the complexity of the matter and also the large amount of information provided by the unions to the Pay Board. I undertake that, when the report is provided, we shall carry out our undertaking to discuss with the TUC and CBI their views on its implementation.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE (SUPPLY)

Ordered,
That this day, as soon as the House has entered upon the Business of Supply, Mr. Speaker shall put forthwith the Questions which under the provisions of paragraph 11 of Standing Order No. 18 (Business of Supply) he is directed to put at Ten o'clock.—[The Prime Minister.]

STATUTORY INSTRUMENTS

Motion made, and Question put forthwith pursuant to the Standing Order (Statutory Instruments).
That the Local Government Superannuation (Miscellaneous Provisions) (No. 2) Regulations 1973 be referred to a Standing Committee on Statutory Instruments.—[Mr. Prior.]

Question agreed to.

TOWN AND COUNTRY PLANNING (AMENDMENT) BILL

3.37 p.m.

Mr. William Molloy: I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to amend the Town and Country Planning Acts.
In seeking leave to introduce my Bill, I wish to mention that the nation owes an immense debt of gratitude to the late Lewis Silkin—Lord Silkin—who, by introducing his Town and Country Planning Acts, did so much to protect our countryside, towns and people from the ravages of ill-considered development and at the same time introduced a vital element of civilised behaviour in planning matters.
The Bill will cover three essential features. Ever since 1968 it has been accepted by successive Governments that planning control, to be effective, requires the active participation of those who live in the area affected by the planning decision. Legislation by both Labour and Conservative Governments in planning matters has made for greater participation—and indirectly the Local Government Act 1972, by increasing the publicity given to the proceedings of local authorities, has also assisted in this aim. Nevertheless, while participation continues to be regarded as desirable, and I would say vital, in the making of local authority planning decisions, participation—particularly in working-class and lower-middle-class areas—has all too often been defeated by the sheer volume and technicalities involved in the consideration of applications. The purpose of the proposed Bill is not to affect the principles of planning law but to strengthen the element of participation in the procedures which now exist.
In general there are three major areas in our planning procedures which need to be dealt with before we can begin to have a universally effective participation These involve questions of information expertise and timing.
As to information, the position at the moment is that where a planning application has been received a local authority may—and many, though not all. do—attempt to bring it to the notice of local residents by advertisement in the local Press and by putting a notice upon the


site itself. However, in many cases these notices are in technical language and are virtually meaningless to those most affected by them. Even the likelihood of such notices being seen is all too remote.
My Bill would make it obligatory for a local authority to notify every household which would be affected by a planning application that the application had been received. In addition, a short explanation would have to be made of what the effect would be if such an application were granted.
Again, information is more likely to be widespread if associations of householders as well as individual householders are aware of the situation. In many areas, but mainly in upper-middle-class areas, residents' associations or amenity associations have been created which play a commendable part in acting as the community's watchdog against undesirable planning applications. The growth of such associations should be encouraged.
My Bill would make provision for information to be made available to all residents' associations provided that their existence had been notified to the local authority.
Here a word should be said about residents' associations. As I have said, they tend to flourish in middle-class areas. The reason for this is that among their numbers such associations invariably have solicitors, architects, town planners and so on who readily give their services and who have at least a comparable expertise with the officials of the local authority. This expertise is lacking in working-class areas, as are the resources needed to acquire such expertise.
My Bill would enable grants to be made to resident's associations to enable them to act on behalf of the local community

in all planning applications which they wished to oppose.
The third change that the Bill would make concerns the question of timing. As I have said, one of the major difficulties about participation is the volume of planning applications and therefore the speed with which such decisions are made by the local authority. All too often an application has been approved even before residents are aware of its existence.
The Bill would ensure that residents' associations had the right within 28 days of an application being approved by the local authority to appeal to the Minister against the decision of the local authority and for the costs to the association to be met out of public funds.
By these three means, local residents would be brought more actively within the scope of those planning applications that affected them, and they would have the knowledge, time and expertise with which to put their case as strongly as it could be put.
I contend that my Bill would widen the frontiers of our democracy, humanise an element of our administration and benefit all our people.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill ordered to be brought in by Mr. William Molloy, Mr. Ronald Brown, Mr. Thomas Cox, Mr. James Wellbeloved, Mr. Sydney Bidwell, Mr. Eric Heffer, Mr. Harry Ewing, Mr. W. T. Williams, Mr. Neil McBride, Mr. Denzil Davies, Mr. S. C. Silkin and Mr. John Silkin.

TOWN AND COUNTRY PLANNING (AMENDMENT)

Bill to amend the Town and Country Planning Acts, presented accordingly and read the First time ; to be read a Second time upon Friday 22nd February and to be printed. [Bill 63.]

Orders of the Day — SUPPLY

[8TH ALLOTTED DAY]—considered.

Orders of the Day — CIVIL ESTIMATES, 1974–75 (VOTE ON ACCOUNT)

Mr. Speaker: Mr. Speaker proceeded, pursuant to the order this day, to put forthwith the Question,
That a sum, not exceeding £6,724,384,300, be granted to Her Majesty out of the Consolidated Fund, on account, for or towards defraying the charges for the Civil Departments, as set out in House of Commons Paper No. 44 for the year ending on 31st March 1975.

Question agreed to.

Orders of the Day — CIVIL AND DEFENCE ESTIMATES, SUPPLEMENTARY ESTIMATES, 1973–74

Mr. Speaker: Mr. Speaker proceeded, pursuant to the order this day, to put forthwith the Question,
That a Supplementary sum, not exceeding £883,885,000, be granted to Her Majesty out of the Consolidated Fund, to defray the charges that will come in course of payment during the year ending on 31st March 1974, for expenditure on Civil Defence Services as set out in House of Commons Papers No. 46 and 45.

Question agreed to.

Bill ordered to be brought in upon the foregoing resolutions and upon the resolution of the House of 12th December 1973 relating to the Defence Estimates, 1974–5 (Vote on Account), by the Chairman of Ways and Means, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Tom Boardman, Mr. Terence Higgins and Mr. John Nott.

Orders of the Day — CONSOLIDATED FUND

Bill to apply certain sums out of the Consolidated Fund to the service of the years ending on 31st March 1974 and 1975, presented accordingly and read the First time ; to be a read a Second time tomorrow and to be printed. [Bill 62.]

EMPLOYMENT SERVICES AND TRAINING

3.45 p.m.

Mrs. Renée Short: I beg to move,
That this House takes note of the Fourth, Sixth and Seventh Reports from the Expenditure Committee in the last Session of Parliament.
We have the opportunity today to debate some of the reports from the Expenditure Committee. I am sorry to see so few hon. Members present since the reports before the House today are the result of a year's consolidated energetic work on the part of the Expenditure Committee and its sub-committees. Some of the reports have been published in time for the Government to produce their documents and their proposals on certain aspects of policy.
I am grateful to the members of my Committee for their support, to our Clerk, Mrs. Sharpe, and to the expert witnesses who sent in memoranda and appeared before us to give oral evidence.
As a result of our comprehensive inquiries into the employment services three reports were published, one on the youth employment services, one on the employment of women, and one on the Government's proposal for reorganising and improving the public image of the Department's responsibilities. We applaud many of these proposals, and we welcome the determination of the Department to turn the dreary old labour exchanges into modern, well-equipped job centres using up-to-date methods of assessing and fulfilling customers' needs, training staff to approach customers in a more capable and friendly way, separating job placement and vocational guidance from the payment of unemployment benefit, and the reorganisation of the professional and executive register. All this we welcome, and we shall be looking with great interest to see how it develops.
Our inquiry provided useful material for the debates on the proposals to reorganise the youth employment service and for a private Member who introduced a Bill to control private employment agencies. Our recommendations were published well in advance of the publication of the Government's White Paper "Education: A


Framework for Expansion", and had considerable relevance to the areas covered by that White Paper.
However, it is on the report dealing with the employment of women that I wish to concentrate. Again, our recommendations were available to the Government many months before their discussion document "Equal Opportunities for Men and Women" was published last September.
This is an opportune time to talk about women in this House because, in the difficult economic climate created by the Government's decision to introduce three-day working, women are bearing a considerable amount of the brunt of the problem. There is a great deal of ignorance about the way that we treat women. We pay much lip service to equality, but progress comes very slowly.
To illustrate that, one has only to look at the position on equal pay. The Act is on the statute book and must be implemented in less than two years. But how much progress has been made? If a recent survey by the Office of Manpower Economics is to be believed, many firms do not know their obligations under the Equal Pay Act, and the Secretary of State for Employment seems not to be too bothered about that either. When we have pressed him in the House to require firms to achieve 90 per cent. of equal pay by 1973, as the Act allows him to do, he has refused. Stage 2 has deliberately slowed down progress towards equal pay. The law has been broken, with Government connivance, and women have suffered as a result.
The TUC, at a special conference that it called last February to discuss the economic situation of the nation, said:
The stage 2 formula has made it impossible for women whose rates are less than 85 per cent. to achieve 90 per cent. The fact that the Government has delayed phased increases under existing equal pay agreements, that there was delay under phase 2, and a reduction of such increases and then the Minister's refusal to make the order providing for 90 per cent. at least by the end of 1973, all adds up to a negative approach to the problem.
As long as women are prepared to be second-class citizens receiving poor wages while doing essential jobs in industry, so long will they remain undervalued economically, sexually, and in every other way.
It is not just a matter of pay. How many girls take up apprenticeships after leaving school? How many girls go into dead-end jobs without training or prospects? Women constitute 40 per cent. of the work force, but their skills are undervalued.
When the Expenditure Committee took evidence on this matter it discovered that only 7 per cent. of girls, or three out of 40, entered apprenticeships and that three-quarters of those are in hairdressing, where, let us face it, unregistered hairdressers regard apprentices as cheap labour and are not interested in their training on the job or in day release as a preliminary to the City and Guilds examinations. A leading article of The Times of 13th April 1973 called this a "shocking" state of affairs. Indeed it is.
On the other hand, almost 40 per cent. of boys leaving school entered apprenticeships. But 36 per cent. of girls went into clerical work, where they are expected to acquire basic skills by themselves, and 38 per cent. of girls went into other jobs in shops, in showrooms, in restaurants and in cafés where no training is given.
Only 10 per cent. of young women, compared with 40 per cent. of young men, get day release. It is a scandalous situation that the lowest numbers of women granted day release are in those industries, such as clothing and footwear, the distributive trades, insurance and banking, and the textile industry, where the highest proportion of women is employed. We recommend that it should be a statutory requirement that all young workers should have day release and that there should be commercial apprenticeships for young people, both boys and girls. I had an opportunity to look at the departmental reply, which was published only yesterday, from which I see that our proposals for day release have not been accepted by the Minister.
Few women are admitted into Government training centres: first, because the vocational training scheme is geared to industries that are traditionally interesting and regarded as important to men, such as the engineering and construction trades, offering women only commercial subjects ; secondly, because it is practically impossible for a woman with a family to leave them while she takes a course


at a Government training centre which may be far from her home ; and, thirdly, because of the blatant discrimination in the training allowances paid to men and women.
Although the Expenditure Committee highlighted this in 1972, drawing attention to the allowance of £11·75 for a single man compared with £10·75 for a woman, married or single, no action has so far been taken by the Minister to improve this situation. In fact, a recent Department of Employment News publicises the inequality. A married man with two children gets £17·70 a week during training, but a married woman, whatever her family commitments, gets only £10·75. It would appear that the boast to do away with sex discrimination, which appeared on the back page of the same newspaper, was a little premature. The Government would do well to put their own house in order. We recommended that inequality in training grants between men and women should be removed.
Many firms and institutions have progressive policies on paper, but they do not work out in practice. The BBC is a good example. Few women get promotion to top jobs in the BBC. Women are not considered these days to be suitable as news readers on any scale at all.
Teachers achieved equal pay 13 years ago. But how many women heads are there? Although they represent about 75 per cent. of primary school teachers, there are fewer and fewer women heads in primary schools. In 1961, when equal pay was won, there were 12,350 women primary heads. In 1970 there were only 10,242 women primary heads, and there had been an increase of 91 more headships. That means that there were over 2,000 fewer women heads than in 1961. One has the nasty suspicion that more women were promoted to the headships of primary schools before 1961 because it was more economic for LEAs to appoint them.
There are 44 Vice-Chancellors. None is a woman. There are 42 heads of university education departments and institutes. None is a woman. There are 44 registrars. None is a woman. It is a little monotonous, is it not? The Secretary of State, the statutory woman in the Cabinet responsible for education and science, ought to feel pretty outraged by

this dismal story. I should be if I were in her shoes. But then I should not have allowed this situation to continue.
The Civil Service, too, is full of anomalies and prejudice against women. Even though the industrial Civil Service has achieved a woman's rate of 92½ per cent., which is obviously better than private industry, women cleaners in the Civil Service get less than men. They do the same jobs as men, but they get about £2 a week less. Indeed, Government Departments are not averse to using contract cleaners whose rates for women are nothing short of a scandal.
In the higher echelons the story is the same. The opportunities for women to be promoted to the ambassadorial ranks and the higher posts in our embassies abroad, even to permanent secretaries in Departments, are very few and far between. The Government, as employer, should do better and provide an example for private industry to follow.
The fault does not lie all on the side of the Government. I wonder what the trades unions have been doing about it? The leading TUC witness told the Expenditure Committee that he did not approve of married women working. Clearly much needs to be done to educate trade unionists who, again, pay lip service to the theme of equality but who are content to see women remain underpaid for doing unskilled routine work. However, I am glad that the TUC has a strong women's advisory committee that has been bringing a good deal of pressure to bear on its male colleagues.
Flexible hours would help women who have dual responsibilities. Working women have responsibilities at home to their families and to their jobs. Flexible hours to fit in with the time that a woman with a family has to offer is a sensible arrangement, and firms that have tried this idea are pleased with the response. I hope that the Department and the Minister will discuss this matter with the unions and the employers.
If women are to play their full part it must be possible for them to have time away from their families. This places great responsibility on both the Government and local authorities to provide the facilities which will make it possible for women to do just that.
More nursery schools are essential from the child's point of view in a firm


foundation for his future educational and emotional progress is to be laid. But, here again, a more flexible and courageous attitude is needed. Mornings or afternoons at a nursery school do not meet the needs of the child whose mother has to work full time, as many women do, even when there is not this present situation burdening women. They have to do it either because their husband's pay is insufficient to meet the needs of the family and provide them with a decent standard of living, or because they are unsupported mothers who have to work and for whom social security is totally inadequate.
We also have to accept that women should be free to take a job if they wish to do so. All too often we adopt an ambivalent attitude towards working women and make them feel guilty if they want to take a job and not just stay at home to look after their families all the time.
We have proposed—and so have many organisations, including the TUC—that pressure should be put on the Secretary of State for Education and Science to provide more nursery places. We make that recommendation because we need more many more full-time places than are indicated in the White Paper on the expansion of the education services.
After the publication of the White Paper last December, the TUC published a document in which it supported the case for more nursery schools and more nursery centres, combining the day nursery with the nursery school, and also supporting our recommendation that there should be more after-school and holiday care for those children whose mothers cannot afford to take four, five or six weeks off work during the summer when the schools are on holiday. That is an opportunity for women's organisations to provide the kind of care and supervision that is needed at these times.
With the short working week, now imposed, some women have to work on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Those who have to work on Saturday when their husbands are also at work are placed in a difficult position in finding someone to look after their children. The restricted hours of the nursery class never meet the needs of the working mother, and there is a need for nursery education to be provided on a much more flexible

basis than the Minister has indicated in her White Paper.
We also considered discussing with employers the possibility of their providing facilities at their premises for nursery education. This is usual in many countries abroad. Some hospitals in this country have tried it, some Civil Service Departments are adopting this practice, and I gather that they are satisfied with the response.
When I asked the TUC witnesses why the TUC was not pressing for such provision, they asked why they should relieve the Secretary of State for Education and Science of her responsibility to provide nursery education. It may be that there will now be second thoughts on the matter, because the women members of the TUC are more open minded about this, as women generally are. I hope that the TUC will regard this as something that might be discussed with employers when times are more conducive to it. The ideal would be for firms to provide the accommodation, and thus relieve the Minister of the capital cost of providing it, and then hand the whole thing over to the Minister to staff and run the scheme. In that way there would be more nursery education for more children, and it is that in which I am primarily interested.
The inescapable conclusion to which we all came as a result of our investigations into the employment services was that we need a revolution in our attitude to women and girls at work and in training. Parents, employers, unions and, above all, schools need to adopt a much more flexible and less hidebound attitude. The brainwashing of girls starts at an early age. It starts when they are very young, when their picture books tell them that their rôle in life is to play with prams and dolls. It is the little girl who helps mummy to bake a cake, but it is the little boy who helps daddy to mend the car. That sort of think starts at an early age and continues throughout a girl's life.
Careers guidance in schools leaves a great deal to be desired. Why not suggest less conventional careers and less conventional training for girls? Why not end segregation of the sexes? Even in mixed schools boys and girls are taught separate crafts so that they grow up thinking that housecraft is for girls and metalwork is for boys. There is no law


of the Medes and Persians which says that girls should not be taught metal and woodwork, and the boys should not do domestic work and cookery. This is done in some secondary modern and comprehensive schools, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
Mathematics and science teaching for girls should be considerably improved, because without it how shall we get our women engineers—civil, mechanical and electrical—our women bridge builders and' road designers, and our women aeronautical engineers and pilots? Serious concern is felt over inexpert careers teaching. We found from our inquiries that in many schools the career teachers are seldom properly trained. Few of them have the opportunity of following a worthwhile career structure, with the result that the usual pattern of advice is given to girls. Those who do not obtain O-level passes go into shops, offices, factories and hairdressing, while the O-and A-level girls go into nursing and teaching.
We were struck by the fact that the witness of one teachers' organisation, when asked how careers guidance in schools was organised, said that the headmaster usually called into his study a teacher who had two or three free periods a week and said "You're doing careers!" The person concerned had to undertake the job without any training, without any opportunity for a career structure within the school, and with no knowledge of the courses available for students other than those set out in leaflets issued by the Department—and one requires considerable knowledge on how to use those documents. No knowledge about training facilities is provided by the Minister's Department. The system is a half-cocked affair, and the Departments of Employment and Education and Science should take the situation on board.
Some months after the publication of our report there was published the document "Equal Opportunities for Men and Women". I find it a disappointing document. It is a rather flabby and puny affair. Perhaps the Minister would tell us how many organisations and individuals have sent comments to his Department, because the closing date for receiving them was 30th November.
I say that that document is rather a puny affair because we know that some employers have been working like beavers to exploit loopholes in the Equal Pay Act. There is still discrimination in industry and training, in certain social security benefits, in credit facilities, in housing, and in a whole range of activities.
It is only with regard to employment that the Government propose to take any action at all. Two Select Committees, one from this House and one from the other place, have considered this matter. In addition, a mass of information has been collected by the Expenditure Committee. There is no shortage of information on this subject, yet it is only with regard to employment that the Government have felt it necessary to take action.
Speaking about the need for anti-discrimination legislation in connection with education, the Select Committee said:
The view that differences exist in the opportunities and facilities available and in the assumptions about future careers for boys and girls is strongly held. We believe that the DES have been complacent in their reaction to these criticisms. We recommend that the Secretary of State should establish machinery to keep these areas of concern under review.
We find from the document that the Minister is only going to ask HMIs to undertake a study of unequal opportunities for boys and girls.
The studies have been done and it is action that we want.
As for careers guidance, the Secretary of State will simply discuss with careers teachers what rôle they can play, but that is not enough. The right hon. Lady should take steps to act on the recommendations that have been made. Discussions with the NUT should be held so that the right kind of opportunities and career structures can be provided for these people. Although there has been much evidence about discrimination over the entry of girls to certain departments of universities, there has been no determination to act on it. Therefore, one can conclude only that the evidence is not being taken seriously.
The revolution that we need seems slow in coming, but if we are to use the skill and ability of our population—and the most important part is our women—more has to be done. I believe that our recommendations are the minimum that need to be acted upon in order to create


a new climate to encourage women to play their part in many areas of society, because they have a considerable rôle to play. But because of the lack of opportunity and because of prejudice among many employers and unions in some areas, women are denied their opportunity of competing on equal terms and of making their contribution to the better world that we all want.
However, I am delighted that the TUC has accepted most of our recommendations. I expect that the Minister has had a copy of its replies to our report dated 8th August 1973. The TUC was quicker off the mark than the Department in letting us have its views. The unions have not been slow to make criticisms of the proposals which are contained in the discussion paper, "Equal Opportunities for Men and Women". I shall be interested in the departmental reply to see how many of our recommendations are accepted. Many of them have been accepted, but certain crucial ones, such as those on day release and education, need to be considered again by the Minister.
I have pleasure in presenting these reports. I hope that hon. Members on both sides of the House, should they catch your eye, Mr. Speaker, will be able to make contributions on the other two reports which I have not had time to discuss.

4.14 p.m.

Dame Irene Ward: I am a member of the Expenditure Committee and take a great interest in it as well as serving on some of its important subcommittees. I did not intend to speak this afternoon but I have listened with great interest to the comments and occasionally one feels that one must make a contribution. I do not always agree with the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mrs. Renée Short) but there are occasions when I do. One such occasion is this afternoon, when she made an informative speech on the reports.
A great deal of work and effort is put into preparing these reports by the Civil Service and much expenditure comes from public funds to maintain the services, but it worries me that the Government, whom I support with great pleasure, should not take more notice of

this all-party committee. Even the membership of its sub-committees is balanced roughly between the Opposition and the Government. As far as I know, the reports have the support of the whole Committee and that of our distinguished Chairman.
It is inexplicable that the Government should not have gone into greater detail and should not have said that they were determined to act on some of the Committee's recommendations. I have heard that the Government are not certain whether they want to wind up the debate. It is not the Government's business whether they want to wind it up. If I want to make a speech, I shall not ask the Government whether I can do so. I will make my own speech as I wish.
I wish to make it clear that I am not a member of women's lib.

The Minister of State, Department of Employment (Mr. R. Chichester-Clark): I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Tynemouth (Dame Irene Ward) does not think that I was wishing that she should not make a speech. I rose to speak just now because I did not see any of my hon. Friends rising to speak. I am delighted that my hon. Friend is taking part in the debate. I share her views about the small attendance.

Dame Irene Ward: I am grateful for my hon. Friend's intervention. The Minister's Parliamentary Private Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Brighouse and Spenborough (Mr. Proudfoot), who is a great friend of mine and who comes from my area, went round asking hon. Members whether they wanted to speak ; but he did not bother to come to me. I always try to be present on these all-party committee occasions when we discuss general interests, and it is absolutely right that Committee members should let the Government know what they think about their replies to the various reports.
The Government have declared themselves—I am delighted and proud of them—to be in favour of equality between men and women. I do not mind whether women take full advantage of what may be offered, but it is sometimes difficult for women to find equal training opportunities. It is understandable that


employers are cautious about spending money on training female employees because, quite naturally, many of them leave their profession or industrial undertaking when they fall in love and want to get married. However, this should not interfere with the Government's decision to try to ensure that there is equality for women in training, jobs and promotion.
For about two years I have been suggesting to the Minister for Transport Industries that there should be a woman on the British Railways Board. I like men very much indeed. On the whole, they have a much wider experience than women in matters of trade, diplomacy and defence. But I think that women are much better than men at detail. If the Government were better at matters of detail their policies might be much more effective.
There does not seem to be anybody on the British Railways Board who can point out, for instance, the difficulties of elderly and disabled people and women with children in struggling at stations to get on trains because the Government have decided that porters should do two jobs. The board does not seem to mind tuppence whether the disabled have anybody to help them, although I know that the authorities are very good if people ring up and ask for a chair to carry a disabled person.
The Minister for Transport Industries has said to me "As soon as I can find a suitable woman to put on the board I shall appoint her", but he has not the foggiest idea how to find one. I wrote to the Prime Minister—I always believe in writing to my right hon. Friend ; it is very good to get him on our side in matters of detail—pointing out that it was peculiar that the Minister for Transport Industries did not seem to know how to find a woman suitable for appointment to the British Railways Board. The Prime Minister agreed that there should be a woman on the board. I think that he had a word with the Minister for Transport Industries about it. But what has happened? Nothing.
The National Council of Women—a very distinguished women's organisation which gives very useful advice on many subjects—put forward the name of a woman who would be suitable for

appointment to the board. She was not appointed. After I had written I do not know how many letters to the Minister for Transport Industries, my right hon. Friend indicated, very politely, that perhaps the lady whose name had been put forward was slightly old for appointment to the board. Apparently, he would prefer to appoint someone who was younger but had the sort of experience which a woman appointed to serve on the board should have. But again he used the phrase "When I can find a suitable woman".
I wrote to the National Council of Women saying that I would help the Minister because either he did not know much about women or he did not know how to find a suitable woman for appointment. I accepted the Minister's view that it would perhaps be better to appoint a younger person. I asked the council whether there were any other women whom it would care to recommend. Some time ago it gave me the name of a woman and all her details. I sent the information to the Minister for Transport Industries. I received a postcard saying that my letter had been received, but nothing has happened since.
I do not accept the criticisms of the hon. Lady the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Science. We are very lucky to have such a distinguished Secretary of State. She is the tops.

Mr. William Hamilton: She is a disaster.

Dame Irene Ward: That may be the hon. Gentleman's view, but his party is not in office. I support the Government. As I have said, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Science is the tops, and the Prime Minister and the rest of the Cabinet are very lucky to have her in the Cabinet. That is the opinion—it has not always been so—of many people in the teaching profession. It is no good hon. Members opposite laughing. If my constituents did not like what the Government were doing, they would have thrown me out. I represent the Government's point of view, and I think I am entitled to speak for the Government.
The Secretary of State for Education and Science is Co-Chairman of the


Women's National Commission, which is an all-party body with very distinguished women on it. I tried to find whether there was anyone in the commission who might be recommended to the Minister for Transport Industries to serve on the British Railways Board. I discovered that the commission has a register of women suitable for such appointments. I propose to send a copy of it to the Minister for Transport Industries, who does not seem to know how to find a woman suitable for appointment to the British Railways Board.
I have again written to the Minister for Transport Industries asking whether he would like me to ascertain whether the Secretary of State for Education and Science would care to recommend a woman for appointment. Again I have had no reply. He keeps on using the phrase "When I find a suitable woman". It is both humorous and deplorable that even when the Government, from the Prime Minister downwards, have said that they would welcome the appointment of a woman to the board no woman has been appointed. If that is the Government's policy—and I am glad that it is—I should like it to be implemented. It is absolutely ridiculous that the Minister for Transport Industries has not found a woman suitable for appointment to the board. I am sure that he has some suitable women in his own Department.
I have waited a long time to get these views into the OFFICIAL REPORT. I shall probably need to take a few more kicks at Ministers but I hope that before long there will be a suitable woman on the board.
I agree with many of the views expressed by the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East, yet almost nobody is here to take part in this debate. This is very bad when the Committee concerned is so important. The Committee on which I sat made a report on improvement grants and another on transport, and at the moment we are discussing the new towns, all of which have tremendous problems. I am glad that, up to a point, my Government have accepted many more of our proposals than they are apparently prepared to accept in the report to which the hon. Member referred.
Another point which is perpetually made by knowledgeable and effective women is that when only so many places are available at medical schools and we want as many trained doctors as possible the bias is against women and in favour of men. Many women, and I expect many men, are aware of this discrimination. I think that I can foresee the Government's answer. When we need more fully trained doctors as quickly as possible, we have to bear in mind that women often train for two years and then suddenly throw it up because love overtakes them and they want to get married. I am in favour of women getting married if they choose the right husband, and I acknowledge the argument that women falling out to get married reduce the number of trained doctors. I do not support the argument against discrimination because I can see a reason for it.
I should like now to go back to the training of people in the ancillary professions. There has been a long fight for training for speech therapists and physiotherapists. That important section of our society never seem to get enough support from my Government. I do not blame the Secretary of State for Social Services, who is very helpful, but he has to make a case to the Treasury. Devoted though I am to the present Chancellor—I think that he is absolutely a top person, too—with all that he has to do he does not always have time to examine whether physiotherapists have proper salary and career structures. As the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East said, we do have male nurses, and the great thing is to see that male and female receive equal pay.
I have had great pleasure in supporting this Government because they have human souls—much better than some other Governments, even of my own party, in the past—but they sometimes do not seem to realise the problems of the widow or the mother of the illegitimate child. They say that the law takes care of all these matters. It does not. Nervous people do not always know what legal action they can take. I call them the "fragile people". When husbands fall down on paying maintenance awarded by courts, I often say "Why have you not gone back to the court?" They are terrified of even the nicest clerks of courts.


I understand that. It is the necessity for this human touch that women could bring home to even the highest in the land.
For example, after the Chancellor's broadcast about the mini-Budget, I wrote to tell him how much I had enjoyed it. What he had said had made it simple for many people, and he had also included many endearing human touches. If we can get to the present Chancellor—and as Members of Parliament we can—we can achieve a great deal.
We were all so proud of the Expenditure Committee when it was set up. It has done a good deal of work, but some hon. Members do not think that some of the things are worth while. But they should express their views in language that one understands, considering that it is an all-party Committee. The views on this report have come from all parties, and no Government have a right to reject some of these proposals without giving adequate reasons.
I have often been told that women do not study languages, for example, as a means of entering the Diplomatic Service. But hon. Members, even in the Government, should take more trouble to find out the advantages that women can offer over a wide field.
The opposition of the Department of Health and Social Security to the provision of domiciliary physiotherapists on Tyneside was incredible. The then Chairman of the Newcastle Regional Hospital Board, who unfortunately died recently, agreed with the requests of the domiciliary physiotherapists. He said "I have only one fund that I can spend as I like without the permission of the Minister."—he did not mean the present one, who is very co-operative— "As this is the only fund, I will help the physiotherapists". Yet the Government paid no attention to that, although he was a distinguished man.
Some of the things that ordinary backbenchers find out about the workings of Government Departments make one wonder how one lives at all. I support many of the views of the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East, and I should like a real explanation of how the appropriate Minister dared to turn down the recommendations of this report when there are so many committees concerned

with women. We have a committee under the Department of Employment which meets two or three times a year. It is an all-party committee, in which we have to fight tremendously hard. In the old days the Minister responsible had to get the message through to the Cabinet. I can never find out whether the message ever reaches the Cabinet. That is part of the problem of parliamentary life. Some Ministers are most co-operative and helpful. But if there is anything which will be critical of their Department, they close up like clams. Men do that much more than women. Women are much more outspoken.
I am pleased to have had the opportunity to say what I have said. I hope that I shall have a satisfactory answer and that the Minister will reconsider the report about the employment of women, to which the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East has referred. I hope that we shall get some more action.

4.41 p.m.

Mr. W. E. Garrett: This may be a historic occasion. I am speaking immediately after the hon. Member for Tynemouth (Dame Irene Ward), who happens to be one of my constituents. She is not standing for election to the next Parliament, so she may have made her last speech in this Chamber. But one can never tell ; the present Parliament may last for another year or so.
I hope to follow my normal practice of being brief and to the point. It was a pleasure to be a member of the subcommittee under the chairmanship of my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mrs. Renée Short). She deserves a great deal of credit for getting out the report on the employment of women. Credit should also be given to those who gave evidence and, above all, to the staff, who worked so assiduously behind the scenes to supply members of the sub-committee with the information that they required.
It is regrettable that a report such as this should be debated before such a thin House. It is more regrettable that lady Members of Parliament are not in attendance today in the numbers that they should be. Before the House accuses me of being anti-feminist, let me say that those who know me will probably have a different view.
The report analyses the job prospects and promotion prospects of women in employment. Much of the evidence that we gathered we knew in our hearts was true. Job prospects are not as wide as they should be. My hon. Friend dealt adequately with that point in her speech. Promotion prospects for women are virtually non-existent in many industries. Employers, particularly employers of female labour, should read this report and see what they can do to widen the promotion prospects of women. I am referring not in general to the professions but to industry. My experience of industry is based on the engineering industry. I have been appalled to see, day after day, particularly during the war years, women playing such an important part in this vital industry, operating lathes, milling machines, drilling machines and so on, producing the same number of units per day as the men, yet receiving less pay. That is distressing.
I am proud to be a member of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers. That union has been on record for many years as pursuing the principle of equal pay for equal work. Other large unions within the TUC also have a similar principle. But the fact remains that, with one or two honourable exceptions, the situation is that women receive much lower wage rates than they should receive, and little progress has been made.
In some respects we can blame the women themselves. Within the democracy of many trade unions the rules are applied to men as they are to women. The rules are applied equally. But women, unfortunately, do not make full use of the democratic procedures of their trade unions. Indeed, if they did we should see many more women assuming major positions within the trade union movement. I see no reason why women should not be members of the executive bodies of some of the trade unions. The chances and opportunities exist, but regrettably women do not take them.
Critics of my statements will say that other factors are involved. That is so. But that does not apply to all women. Some women have the ability, skill and knowledge required, and an understanding of not only the industry in which they work but the negotiating procedures. They should play a more active part. If they decide to do so, clearly their voice in support

of the principle of equal pay for equal work will be enhanced.
Promotion prospects are very important to people in industry in general. People in industry are always working towards an objective, towards getting as much as they can for the product that they produce. But there are also people in industry who have some desire for promotion opportunities. In the engineering industry in particular these are nonexistent. Employers should make the most of the opportunity that is available. But ultimately it looks as though the battle will have to be won by the women playing a much more active part. In spite of the difficulties facing the country at present, the fight could be maintained. We in this Chamber today have done virtually everything possible to help women to maintain their just causes and prospects and their recognition as people who are equal in our society. The battle must be fought outside this Chamber. It must be fought within the trade union movement.
I hope that what I have said will be recognised by the millions of women employed in industry. I hope that they will not give up the fight but will continue to fight with added vigour towards what is a just and legitimate goal.

4.48 p.m.

The Minister of State, Department of Employment (Mr. Robert Chichester-Clark): I must begin by congratulating the members of the Committee on producing the three very powerful, penetrating and timely reports which we are discussing today. In particular, I congratulate the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mrs. Renée Short), and sympathise with her, as I do with my hon. Friend the Member for Tynemouth (Dame Irene Ward), about the sparseness of the attendance today when we are discussing such important matters.
The hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East had the advantage of me in that she spent most of her time dealing with one report in particular, the Sixth Report, that dealing with women. I cannot hope to cover all that ground, as I have to deal with three reports this afternoon in a speech which I hope will not be unduly and tediously long. If I do not go into the same amount of detail on the report about women, I hope, like


the hon. Member for Wallsend (Mr. Garrett), that I shall not be accused of being anti-feminist or of being a male Chauvinist.

Mr. Garrett: Not in view of recent events.

Mr. Chichester-Clark: I am obliged to the hon. Gentleman—not in view of recent events in particular. I have never quite understood how the expression "male Chauvinist" ever got into the language of Women's Lib. My historical researches reveal that M. Chauvin was a rather mindless adherent of Napoleon and not even an adherent of the Empress Josephine. How his name gets into this language I have never understood, but perhaps some hon. Member will be able to inform me.
However, I have to deal with three reports. The Fourth Report, on the Youth Employment Services, deals with what must be on any long-term view one of the most vital and significant parts of our whole range of manpower services and one whose future had been under continuing discussion for some years before the report appeared. The report came out just before the Second Reading, in which I was involved, of what is now the Employment and Training Act, 1973.
The Sixth Report, which I have just mentioned, covers another immensely important part of this field, as my hon. Friend the Member for Tynemouth has reminded us. I do not think that she will find, when she has time to read the White Paper on the subject, that as many of the recommendations have been turned down as she might expect. As my hon. Friend reminded us, the Government's consultative document on equal opportunities and the intention to introduce legislation this Session show clearly the weight which we attach to the importance of this matter. However, we shall have many more opportunities to discuss this piece of forthcoming legislation.
I must take up one point made by the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East, who asked me about the number of representations which we had received since the closing date of 30th November. There is no implied rebuke when I say to her that she has fallen into the kind of error into which we all fall on these occasions without realising what we are doing.

It was not a document called "Equal Opportunities for Women" but a document called "Equal Opportunities for Men and Women". If she left out the male sex by a slip of the tongue I am sure that she did not intend it and that she will not do it again. However, I am sure that I shall be guilty of many faults myself as I speak this afternoon. We received 1,300 representations on the matter, and these will be carefully considered.
The Seventh Report, on Employment Services and Training, deals with a tremendously wide range of subjects, from private employment agencies to the special arrangements to help disabled people and the socially disadvantaged, of which there was some discussion at Question Time today. Just how wide a range it covers can be seen from reading through the 31 subject headings listed at the beginning of the report.
The whole House will agree that members of the Committee have carried out an extremely thorough, comprehensive and valuable review of our manpower services, and that their reports, despite what may have been suggested earlier, have made an important contribution towards the sort of far-reaching debate and discussion which is important to the future of these services. I congratulate the chairman of the sub-committee on leading the sub-committee through this labyrinth.
I am sorry that we did not get the White Paper into print before the debate. We tried to do the next best thing by making duplicated copies available to members of the sub-committee, and there are copies available in the Vote Office for hon. Members. By way of apology for the length of time it has taken to produce the White Paper, I should point out that in this case it was a reply to three reports, not just one, covering an enormous amount of ground and touching on the responsibilities of at least eight Government Departments.
That fact does not make my speech any easier. Nevertheless, we hoped that it might be possible to get the White Paper printed in time for the debate, but the times and circumstances are not exactly propitious for getting documents printed in a hurry.
On many of these matters the Government's reply did not have to wait for the formal White Paper in response to the reports. It was thrashed out to a


considerable degree and fully discussed—as I know from the part I took in them—in debates on the Employment and Training Bill in all its stages in the House and in another place, which is all to the good.
The reports of Committees of the House have an immensely important part to play in improving the amount of information available on issues which are currently the subject of parliamentary discussion. These were no exception. As the hon. Lady and other hon. Members have recognised, many parts of these reports were reflected in the legislation. They made a major contribution to the Employment and Training Act, and I like to think that that Act is the better for them.
I want to mention, in particular, the Manpower Services Commission, because it was one of the main fruits of the Act. One of the most important innovations of the Act is the establishment of the commission to take over the management and development of the public employment services. The members of the commission were announced on 4th December. As the House knows, they include representatives of the TUC, the CBI, local government and the education service.
The commission is intended to be a new kind of organisation. We have plenty of committees composed of representatives of various interests, but these committees advise Ministers and are not responsible for the operation of the services. We also have plenty of bodies on which individual industrialists and trades unionists sit and which are responsible for the running of important activities. But in these cases they are there purely in a personal capacity.
The commission came into formal existence on 1st January and held its first meeting as a commission last week. Some hon. Members will have seen the Press notice which was issued from the meeting. The members of the commission are just getting to grips with their task, which, in present circumstances, is just about as important and as challenging as it could be. They agreed at the first meeting on an initial work programme of four points.
The first was to have presentations from the chief executives of the Employment Service Agency and the Training

Service Agency on their present operations and long-term plans. The second was to analyse the present information available on manpower forecasting with a view to improving manpower intelligence and information. The third was to hold meetings in different parts of the country to discuss with employers and trade unions how the commission can best serve them. The fourth was to see at first hand the work of the agencies throughout the country.
With the commission we are giving responsibility for running the manpower services to those who actually use them and who must, therefore, be vitally interested in their operation—obviously employers and workers, but also other interests, such as education. The commission's job is to provide a manpower service to the community as a whole—to individuals seeking new jobs, or training for new jobs, and to employers seeking staff across the whole range of occupations, skills and responsibilities. By involving employers, trade unions and other interests directly in the management of these services, the new arrangements will make the services more responsive to the needs of individuals and employers. This in itself will be a major step forward towards securing many of the improvements which the Committee wanted to see.
The structure of the commission shows the great importance which we as a Government attach to getting those concerned fully involved in the services, which are so important to the country's economic and social life—in other words, what has become known as the tripartite approach, though I admit that in this case it goes a little further than tripartite, because there are interests other than those which we in the House think of as tripartite involved in the commission.
The commission will have two basic tasks—to help people obtain jobs which satisfy their aptitudes and abilities, and to help employers find suitable workers. If we look at some of the ways in which it will do that, it will be clear how big a contribution it has to make on many of the matters covered by the Committee's recommendations.
I begin with the employment services. First, it will be modernising and developing the public employment service and encouraging all workers and employers


to make more use of it, something on which we have been working for a long time, as the hon. Lady realises. To do that, it is necessary to create a service which can offer much more to both employers and job-seekers, and to persuade them to take advantage of it. One of the main ways of doing that will be by improving the employment offices. The Jobcentre programme was launched last year, and it is planned to have more than 800 Jobcentres which will cover the whole of Great Britain by the end of the decade.
Jobcentres will be attractive places, sited in busy shopping centres—the sort of places which many potential customers will see and which will attract them to come in and have a look round and see what is there for them. The Committee commented in its 7th Report on the contrast between some of the old employment exchanges, with their rather depressing premises—some that I saw for myself had an almost Dickensian air of depression—and the much more pleasant and inviting offices which it visited in Sweden.
All that will change. The Jobcentre programme will mark a complete break with the past in this respect. The Jobcentres will not only be better located but will also have a standard form of quality design, lay-out, furnishings and so on which will create a quite different atmosphere. I am sure the Committee was right in thinking that this sort of change will be particularly important in attracting more women to use the public employment service.
Inside the Jobcentres the first tier will be a self-service section, offering job-seekers the opportunity to come and go as they please and to browse through the job display cards setting out details of specific vacancies. When a person finds a vacancy which interests him or her, the receptionist will be ready to telephone the employer and try to fix the person up with an interview there and then.
The next tier will be the employment advisers—staff who are trained to give advice and who know the local manpower scene very well. If the job-seeker cannot find what he wants among the job cards, or would like to discuss other prospects or opportunities, he can ask to see an employment adviser.
At the third tier there is a range of special schemes available through the employment adviser. The job-seeker can be introduced to an occupational guidance specialist, to help those who are uncertain about a career or who think they would benefit from a sympathetic and expert analysis of their employment problem, or he can be recommended for training under the Training Opportunities Scheme ; he has access to the Employment Transfer Scheme which encourages mobility, the careers officer, the special services for disabled people, and so on.
The aim is to have an employment service which will concentrate on the job of helping people to choose and to get the right jobs, and helping employers to get the right staff, as quickly as possible. Unemployment benefit, which can stand in the way of effective employment work, will be managed and organised separately. I am sure that will be an advance. At the same time there is a complete reorganisation of the employment services, to introduce a new style of management with defined objectives at all levels.
I want to come to another aspect of the work of the commission, in regard to the training opportunities scheme. It will be setting about its task by expanding training opportunities and improving training policies throughout industry and commerce.
The inauguration of the Training Opportunities Scheme in August 1972 marked a big step forward in the expansion of Government-sponsored training, both in the number of people trained and in the range of training provided. In 1971 fewer than 15,500 people were trained under the old Vocational Training Scheme. In 1972 we almost doubled that to 29,000. Although we do not yet have the full figures for 1973, I expect to find that about 40,000 people completed the training opportunities courses. The aim for this year is 50,000–55,000. We should be able to achieve that.
The Training Opportunities Scheme now offers not only the traditional courses in skilled trades at the Government training centres but also a broad range of courses, involving vocational education as well as training, at colleges of further education throughout Great Britain.
The coming into existence of the commission was a turning point in the development of the industrial training boards.
I am sure we would all agree that the boards have had a considerable impact on training in their industries over the past eight years. The outlook on training in many companies is very different now from what it was a few years ago.
What about the future? When the commission takes on its new functions, the boards will be looking to the commission and its Training Services Agency to co-ordinate their activities. But it is the boards which will remain responsible for identifying the training needs and priorities of their industries, and for developing the best methods to promote the necessary training. That is a vitally important rôle.
I hope the commission will strengthen the boards by giving them more effective support from the centre. As from 1st April 1975, the commission will have substantial funds—up to £35 million a year—to meet the boards' operating expenses, to help them encourage key training activities in their industries and to enable the Training Services Agency to promote training in sectors of employment not covered by the boards—the gaps to which we have often referred. That is a real improvement on the resources which the Exchequer has made available for this sort of purpose in the past, and it is wholly unaffected by the recently announced cuts in public expenditure, since these only apply for the financial year 1974–75.
Over the next two years the boards will also be moving into the era of exemption schemes, which will take firms which are carrying out training adequate for their own needs outside the complications of the levy system. The Committee was anxious that the impact on training of the limitation on board's levies to 1 per cent. should be closely monitored, and I am sure the commission will wish to do just that. I think that that is one of the interests of the hon. Member for Don-caster (Mr. Harold Walker), who I am glad to see has joined us.
The new system is in no way a dramatic break with the past. What it means is that in the future the boards will be placing more and more emphasis on their rôle in helping firms to solve their training problems and carrying out schemes which are needed by the industry as a whole. At the same time the commission

will be able to take a national view of training needs, and feed in to the boards information about the overall situation which will help them in studying the problems of their own industries.
I hope that the end result of these changes will be to increase the ability of the boards to win the support of their industries and to promote the training that their industries need. I have no doubt at all that they have a crucial part to play in the new set-up, in collaboration with the commission.
I want to come now to the subject of women, which I hope I shall not be accused of having neglected. The commission will be tackling its responsibilities by encouraging increases in the opportunities available to women and girls for employment and training. Parliament wrote a special reference to this into the Employment and Training Act. I have described some of the steps which are already being taken to improve the employment and training services for women, in particular the substantial expansion of training under the Training Opportunities Scheme for women and our hope that the Jobcentre programme will make these offices much more attractive. But the commission may well have further ideas about all this themselves.
Looking at the problem on a wider scale, there are very real problems of attitudes to be overcome here. The committee in its report on the employment of women drew attention to the unconscious acceptance of traditional views about which rôles and occupations are appropriate to women, which can be found at all sorts of levels and in all sorts of places. I have no doubt that if we have an Equal Opportunities Commission, as is proposed in the consultative document on equal opportunities, its work will have an impact on these built-in attitudes and help to change them as time goes on.

Mrs. Renée Short: Will the Minister say what he intends to do about an inequality which I mentioned and for which the Government are directly responsible, namely the inequality between training grants for men and women?

Mr. Chichester-Clark: I intended to cover that and I also wanted to tell the hon. Member about an extension of facilities for women under the training opportunities scheme. Here the number


has risen very dramatically indeed. In March 1970 only about 300 women were in training—less than 4 per cent. of the total. Although the figures are not yet available I estimate that towards the end of last year over 9,000 women were being trained, which is about 36 per cent. of the total. This is much the same as the proportion of women in the labour force, though I think the hon. Lady in her speech put that proportion just a little bit higher. I should like to see many more women receiving training over a much wider range of skills and occupations, but at least things are moving in the right direction.
The hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East and, I think, the hon. Member for Wallsend spoke about GTCs and women. Before the training opportunities scheme was introduced in August 1972 most official training was given in GTCs with the main emphasis on skilled craft occupations, mainly in construction and engineering. These courses have been and will continue to be open to women, but because most of them lead into traditionally male fields of employment very few women apply. The advertisements will, however, emphasise that women have equal access and one point which may be of particular interest to the hon. Member for Wallsend is that there is to be an experiment to offer part-time training in engineering for women who will later want part-time employment.
In colleges of further education and other educational institutions, clerical and commercial courses are the most popular, as one would imagine, but the range at colleges is widening and there is an encouraging trend that the number of women being accepted for training at higher-level occupations such as statistics, personnel management, nurses, training officers and so on is moving up. There are about 150 on these courses.
Training allowances were increased last October when the differential between rates for women and men was again narrowed in progress towards parity at the end of 1975. The rates for both sexes under the age of 20 and without dependants are already equal. I think the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East strayed a little from the path of virtue when she referred to the whole subject of equal pay. If she studies the somewhat

truncated Adjournment debate which took place just before Christmas between myself and the hon. Member for Halifax (Dr. Summerskill) she will find that I refuted then a good many of the points she made this afternoon. I have since refuted by letter other points for which there was not time for refutation in the debate and I am sure this letter will be made available to her.
The most recent statistics I can give from the Pay Board between April and November 1973 show that about 1,500 settlements covering more than 2,800,000 women included a movement towards equal pay. The hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East must remember that the OME report goes back as far as August 1972. We have not been idle on that. Since then about 30 agreements have reached 90 per cent. of male rates, including engineering, and if the hon. Member cares to look at HANSARD for 14th December she will see the various other figures which I hope will comfort her.
I was speaking about public expenditure cuts during Question Time and I assure the House once again that the expansion of the training opportunities scheme will not be seriously affected by the cuts in Government spending announced on 17th December. There will be a slight slowing down in the expansion of training places at Government training centres, but the expansion in colleges of further education remains unaffected as does the target for the Training Opportunities Scheme. As I said earlier, this stands at 50,000 to 55,000. The hon. Lady will be glad to hear that the cuts will not have any substantial effect on the rehousing programme for Jobcentres.
Yet another important field of activity for the commission will be developing the services for groups such as disabled people who need special help. As the House knows well, we are engaged at present in a thorough-going review of the services for disabled people. No doubt the commission will have views on this, and naturally these will be taken very fully into account. Finally, the commission will also administer schemes of assistance to workers moving to new jobs in other districts.
In all these activities, the commission's executive arms will be the Employment


Service Agency and the Training Services Agency. In fact, we expect that the commission will operate in much the same way as the board of directors of a holding company in that the agencies will be rather like operating subsidiaries. The commission will concentrate on the major issues and in particular on the forward programme of work and budgets which will have to be prepared each year. It will be the commission's job to consider the programmes of the two agencies together and to ensure that they add up to a coherent whole.
Employment services and training are obviously closely connected and interdependent in many ways. Naturally the two agencies will have to work closely together as they do now. It will be the commission which has the overall responsibility for making arrangements to help people to select employment, to train and to retain suitable employment, and to help employers to obtain suitable employees. We shall be looking to the commission to ensure that the programme provides the full range of services which are needed to cope with our changing manpower needs.
I am conscious that I cannot cover everything which is in all the reports. However, I am certain that a careful reading of the White Paper will answer many of the points which are in the minds of hon. Members. I end as I began, by congratulating the Committee on its penetrating and extremely useful service to the House.

5.22 p.m.

Mr. J. D. Dormand: I congratulate the Expenditure Committee on its Fourth Report. I do so not only because it chose Youth Employment Services as its subject but for the recommendations that it has made. I dissent from none of those recommendations. I understand that the Government's reply to the report has been published today. I, like other hon. Members, have not had the opportunity of considering it.
I am not sure whether the Minister was expected to deal with or refer to all of the reports. I hope it is not of any significance that he has not mentioned the Fourth Report. Perhaps I should delay any criticism which I may have until I have had the opportunity ot read the Government's reply. We must accept

the Minister's explanation for the extremely short notice which hon. Members have had to study the reply.
I shall speak mainly about careers officers and careers teachers. Before doing so I refer to Recommendation 7, which states:
Specialisation in school should be delayed as long as possible.
There is nothing new in that. Educationists have been saying that for years. The significant thing is that it comes from the Committee. I respectfully suggest that the Committee does not pretend to be one which is mainly concerned with education. It demonstrates that there is continuing pressure for early specialisation so that the education of young people can be fitted into job pigeon holes. That should be resisted by everybody concerned with education from the Secretary of State for Education and Science down to the teacher in the classroom.
To delay specialisation causes organisational difficulties in schools, but those difficulties can be overcome. In any case, they do not warrant introducing specialised courses early in school life. There is not one youngster in 100 who knows absolutely what he or she wants to do at the age of 16, let alone the earlier age at which some schools regrettably tend to specialise.
The report quotes one example in giving the size of the university and college drop-out problem. It is also well known that only a small percentage of school leavers stay in their first job. The school is an educational establishment and not a vocational institute. It must remain so in order that children can be given not only a broad-based all-round education but, at the same time, the widest possible spectrum of job options.
It can be said that at least there is the beginning of a realisation of the need for careers officers and careers teachers. It seems that some local authorities have been much more progressive than others. It was a step forward when youth employment officers had their names changed to careers officers. That was not merely a change of name. The change signified a more positive and constructive approach to their work in that it should be concerned with guidance rather than just having young people "signing on" for a job. I pay tribute to the work done by the officers over many years.
I have known many of them personally. I am sure that they would be the first to admit that much remains to be done. There is no compulsory training for careers officers. Provision for such training is limited to five centres, and at present only 75 per cent. of entrants receive training. My hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mrs. Renée Short) said that a person could be in one job on a Wednesday and a careers officer on a Thursday. That is intolerable. Professional training in careers is more important than ever.
I am delighted that the report recommends that training should be mandatory. However, I say that there should be a two-year training course. One year is totally inadequate for people who have no other training. Apart from the intrinsic value of longer training, it would provide the status which the career requires. In addition, there should at all times be highly organised in-service training schemes.
One further plea I should like to make concerning careers officers is that the Government should make it mandatory for local authorities to appoint a specialist officer who has special responsibility for handicapped children. Most of the larger authorities now have such specialist officers, including my own local authority, Durham County Council, an authority which sets the pace in most local government matters.
There is sufficient experience now to show that specialist advice is absolutely necessary if handicapped children are to make the most of their abilities. It is logical, if the provision of trained careers officers is to be mandatory, that trained careers teachers in secondary schools should be a compulsory requirement. I am glad that the report recognises that that should be done.
For some time there has been a growing awareness in schools of the need for careers advice. Some local education authorities have been conscious of that need. If anyone has any doubts about the general situation, however, the recent report of the Department of Education and Science—namely, "Careers Education in Secondary Schools" —will put the record straight. The report deals with a sample of 87 schools. It is sufficient to show that

the position is totally inadequate. A general finding—and I could give many similar depressing examples—is that only 15 of the 87 schools realise in some important aspects the importance of careers education. That is a devastating comment which indicates the need for a fundamental change of attitude by everyone concerned.
Careers teachers must be recognised in schools as important and essential members of the staff. I can assure the House that at the moment that is not so. Careers teachers must be given time from other teaching duties. There should be supporting staff to deal with matters such as routine clerical work. The report highlights the inadequacy of facilities for careers work in schools.
If this work is to be carried out effectively there must be space set aside for it. I know that the Department of Education and Science, in its building bulletins, recommends that new schools should make provision for this but in practice the careers teacher is often stuck in some hole in a corner which a head teacher finds for him. However laudable the Expenditure Committee recommendation on this subject is it will not be as valuable as it ought to be if attention is not given to some of these bread-and-butter matters.
The Committee recommends the mandatory provision of trained careers teachers, and I fully support that. Unfortunately, the remarks I made about untrained careers officers can also apply to careers teachers. The untrained enthusiast in this work is not good enough ; indeed, when such important decisions have to be made it could be a positive danger. I see no reason why some colleges of education cannot include basic courses in careers work. In addition there should be specialist courses of one year, full-time, for practising teachers, together with a full programme of in-service refresher courses.
The most important question on this subject of training careers teachers is, where will the initiative come from? I doubt whether it will come from the schools, on their record. I also doubt whether it will come from the local authorities, although, as I have said, their record is patchy. I am driven to the conclusion that the responsibility must be placed fairly and squarely at the


door of the Department of Education and Science which has a reasonable record in careers education. I hope that it will do something to implement its own report.
In a reply given as recently as 11th December the Secretary of State for Education and Science said:
we are anxious that careers education in schools should receive high priority."—[OFFICIAL REPORT. House of Commons, 11th December 1973; Vol. 866, c. 177.]
She said that when referring to the Department's report. We shall watch carefully to see just how high that priority is. I hope that she will also take note of this valuable report by the Expenditure Committee.
It is a happy coincidence that a DES report showing such wide gaps in this area should be published at the same time as the report of a major House of Commons Committee saying what should be done to fill those gaps. It provides yet another good reason for prompt action. The Department's report, I am glad to say, pays special attention to the needs of the handicapped in special schools.
It is important that a member of staff, enthusiastic, and with training and experience, should be responsible for careers work for the handicapped in every special school. Co-ordination with the careers officer in such schools is even more important than in what I might describe as ordinary schools. Much remains to be done in special schools. This is an aspect to which the local education authorities and the Department should pay particular attention.
I wish to draw attention to a recommendation of the Expenditure Committee which the Government have already found unacceptable. I refer to the recommendation that the workers' benefit should remain with the LEAs. The Government have decided that the payment of unemployment and supplementary benefits for young people under the age of 18 should be undertaken by the Department of Employment. That is a retrograde step. I noted in reading the evidence given to the Committee that there was a mixed reception to this proposal from the witnesses.
I have had letters from two trades councils in the North-East objecting to this new proposal. Like the Expenditure Committee I consider that the importance of retaining this connection with the Youth Employment Service cannot be over-estimated. The Government's action will cause—I understand is causing—confusion among young people. It will also remove the biggest incentive there is for youngsters to return to the place where this expert guidance can be given. There is no reason why staff cannot be recruited specifically for benefit work. That presents no problems.
I hope that the Government will have another look at this. The Expenditure Committee has drawn attention to a neglected area of education and the social services. It has produced an excellent report and I hope that its labour will not be in vain.

5.35 p.m.

Mr. Robert C. Brown: I should declare my interest immediately as a sponsored member of the General and Municipal Workers Union.
I want to deal with that part of the Sixth Report of the Expenditure Committee which deals with the employment of women. Since my union has over 25,000 women members I am acutely aware of the employment problems facing women. I am glad that the Government seem to be interested in tackling the question of sex discrimination but I think that the barren nature of what they intend must disappoint a great many working women.
Equal pay of itself will not give women equal treatment at work. The attainment of equality and the movement towards equal earnings as distinct from equal basic rates depend on many other factors such as the equalisation of fringe benefits, equal job opportunities, equal protection against lay-off and short-time working, equal facilities for training and more flexible job and career structures to cater for the special circumstances of working mothers. We must give serious consideration to these things. My union is on record as wishing to extend collective bargaining into all areas of working life. It is undeniable that attainment of more equal treatment for women is part of the process.
I wish to say a word about maternity leave. The Government's proposal for 26 weeks of unpaid leave is a step forward. It is not good enough, however, Even with the help of present State benefits, many working mothers would find this a luxury they cannot afford. Paid leave should be a right. We could well take a leaf from the book of some of our Common Market partners. They have a variety of methods for paying maternity leave. This should be a high priority reference to the proposed Equal Opportunities Commission.
More than that, we would also need statutory guarantees of reinstatement without loss of seniority, fringe benefits and so on. That is why I look forward to 25th January and to there being no interruption to the Session through an election. It is then that my Private Member's Bill—the Rights of Women Bill—which includes provisions of this sort, will come up for a Second Reading. Assuming that we do not have any unseemly interruptions, the Government would be ill advised to block that Bill or the Second Reading of the Bill being introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, South (Mr. Michael Cocks) which comes up on the same day and deals with occupational pensions.
I am extremely concerned that the Government have continued to regard the question of occupational pensions for women as being outside the scope of the principle of equality. It is monstrous that in 1974 the Government should be so completely oblivious to modern thinking. This is another example of the selectivity in application which undermines the declared intention of the Government's document and shows the ambivalence of the Government's attitude towards women generally.
Pensions are deferred pay, and if women are excluded from an occupational pension scheme they are denied access to potential benefits. It has been estimated that one-third of the manual working women are not allowed to join their employers' scheme—a situation which the Government apparently are prepared to support. Exclusion from such schemes means that by 1975 these women will have to join the State scheme, paying ½ per cent. of their earnings, for which they will receive neither tax relief nor the benefit of their employer's contributions

to their retirement provision. I urge the Government to review their whole attitude to women's pension rights, and I expect them to correct this inconsistency in their present proposals.
Training opportunities are still denied to womenfolk, young or old, in industry. Of boys between 15 and 17, 40 per cent. get apprenticeships as against 7 per cent. of girls, who are in the main apprentice hairdressers. They represent a large source of cheap labour in the hairdressing trade. Forty per cent. of boys as against 10 per cent. of girls in industry get day release. Fifty per cent. of men receive in-training on the job as against 20 per cent. of women.
If the Equal Opportunities Commission is to be worth anything it must have enforcement powers. If it is to function in a worthwhile manner as an investigative and educative body it must have a free hand in deciding the areas into which it will inquire.
I pay tribute to the Select Committee for its report. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Mr. Dormand), I do not demur from any of the recommendations put forward. I congratulate the Select Committee on several of its recommendations. One recommendation is:
That the provision of day release for young workers should be made a statutory requirement on all employers.
The recommendation refers to "young workers" with no reference to their sex. The recommendation:
That commercial apprenticeships should be provided for young workers in clerical work
is long overdue. We tend to think of sweat shops being back-street clothing factories, but many youngsters are trapped in dead-end clerical jobs. That is evidenced by the rapid turnover in the headquarters of the Department of Health and Social Security at Longbenton, Newcastle. I suspect that one reason for that rapid turnover is the salary that the Government pay their public servants.
Recommendation No. 5:
That the inequality in the training grants paid to women should be removed
is long overdue. I am sorry that the Minister said nothing positive on this matter.
Day nursery and nursery school provision is years behind, and I sincerely hope


that the Government will accept Recommendation No. 7. I hope that the increase in the disregard of £2 for working mothers which involves only £3 million will be carried out as rapidly as possible.
It is regrettable that more women Members of Parliament are not taking part in the debate. Rather than two, there should have been 20. Although we in the North-East are often stereotyped by the poplar Press as "Andy Capp", three hon. Members representing North-Eastern constituencies on the Opposition benches and one on the Government benches have taken part in the debate, and three of us have spoken for women's rights.

5.45 p.m.

Mr. William Hamilton: I make the fourth Member from the North-East to speak because, although I represent a Scottish constituency, I was born and bred, I am happy to say, in Durham. This probably ensures an entry in the "Guinness Book of Records".
Before getting on to the subject matter of the debate, particularly the speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mrs. Renée Short), I wish to comment on how these debates are conducted. Some time the House will have to get down to the way in which it deals with the enormous amount of work that goes on in Select Committees. The hon. Member for Walsall, South (Sir H. d'Avigdor-Goldsmid), who chairs the Public Expenditure Committee, has a thankless chore on his hands. My experience as the Chairman of the Estimates Committee was the same. He and I well know the enormous amount of unpublicised work that goes on in Select Committees, which sit for hour after hour taking oral evidence and preparing reports.
When in due course, after an inordinate delay, those reports are debated on the Floor of the House, there is usually only a small attendance. In this debate on the employment of women not one Conservative member of the sub-committee has bothered to attend. One would think that when an hon. Member has sat on a Committee and attended even occasionally and listened to the oral evidence he would at least wish to make a speech on what he had heard and say what he

thought about the report which he and the all-party Committee had produced.

Sir Henry d'Avigdor-Goldsmid: The hon. Gentleman has a long experience of these matters, and I have commented before on the skill he showed as Chairman of the Estimates Committee. We do our Committee system no service by emphasising the sparse-ness of attendance by Selection Committee reports are debated in the House, because more people read our debates than attend them. The hon. Gentleman should bear in mind that this is the first day after the recess, a day when there is no Whipping procedure and a day when there is a railway disturbance. These three elements militate against attendance. The value of the debate is that the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mrs. Renée Short) has presented her report, which has stimulated the Department to a great deal of activity, and the Department has replied. We therefore have something for which to be grateful.

Mr. Hamilton: We are never short of excuses to offer for the sparseness of attendance at this House, and never more so when we are debating reports from Select Committees. I agree that there is something in what the hon. Member for Walsall, South says, but he knows that when the Prime Minister was answering a Question a little earlier today the House was full. Where are those hon. Members now? He knows as well as I do where they are. Yet we are now discussing matters of fundamental national importance.
We all know that the standard of living of everybody depends on the maximum use of all our labour resources. The Sixth Report from the Expenditure Committee, which my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, North-east and her colleagues on that Committee produced, deals with how best to use more than half of our total potential labour force—namely, women. At the moment about 38 per cent. of the total labour force consists of women, the large majority of whom are married. But many more of them would go out to work—even in a three-day week forced upon us by the present Government—if they had the opportunity to do so.
The report simply underlines evidence given by various organisations showing


why women, although they wish to exercise the right to go out to work, are to some extent inhibited by the discrimination and prejudice that exists against them in the trade unions, among employers and others. This evidence also points to the discrimination that undoubtedly exists in the educational services and in terms of back-up facilities, such as the provision of day nurseries, nursery schools and similar facilities.
These problems have exercised the minds of hon. Members in this House and Members of the other place for a very long time. The hon. Member for Tyne-mouth (Dame Irene Ward), the elderly windbag, did not know what she was talking about. She said she had not even read the report. However, she went on to laud both the right hon. Lady the Secretary of State for Education and Science and the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer—both of whom are now engaged in massive cuts in public expenditure, designed to cut back and retard the provision of those very back-up facilities that are required to enable women to get out and contribute to the national wealth, on which our standard of living depends.
The Secretary of State for Education and Science has already told a Select Committee that she does not believe that discrimination exists against girls in education. She simply does not know. The consultative document "Equal Opportunities For Men and Women" explains that education will not be dealt with because the Secretary of State alleges that she already has sufficient power to deal with any discrimination in education.
A clear conflict of opinion exists among the three Cabinet Ministers who gave evidence to the Select Committee. I refer to the Secretary of State for the Home Department, the Secretary of State for Education and Science, and the Secretary of State for Employment. The Secretary of State for Education and Science said that there was no provable discrimination in education, whereas the other two Secretaries of State said that there was discrimination in employment and in other areas. The Secretary of State for Education and Science is on record as saying that she wants nothing to do with any legislation in this sense. Therefore the proposed legislation, as

foreshadowed in "Equal Opportunities For Men and Women", is in many ways more restrictive than was the legislation which I myself proposed ; and the same can be said of the legislation introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Wood Green (Mrs. Joyce Butler) and that introduced in the other place by Baroness Seear.
The Government through their spokesman have said that legislation to deal with discrimination against women is neither practicable nor desirable. But they have now been forced to engage in what I can only term a whitewashing exercise. There is no intentioin by the Government to introduce legislation on this matter in this Parliament. We might well have an election within three weeks. The chances are that the Prime Minister will now make a run for it because he has got the country into such a mess—and we have not seen the last of it by a long way. There is not a hope in hell of getting legislation to deal with discrimination against women before we have an election. But the Government will then go to the country and say, "Ladies and gentlemen, we have plans…". They have been forced to produce their document because of the overwhelming evidence produced by Select Committees of this House and also by the body of all-party opinion across the board—except the Liberal Party.
It is interesting that no member of the Liberal Party has attended this debate. When I introduced my Bill dealing with anti-discrimination I invited the Liberal Whip, the hon. Member for Roxburgh, Selkirk and Peebles (Mr. David Steel), to take part. I received a short, curt note from him saying, "It is not my cup of tea". But now, having seen the bandwagon rolling, they are quick to jump on it. I leave them to their own consciences.
My hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East today asked the Minister how many replies he had had to the consultative document "Equal Opportunities For Men and Women". The reply given to my hon. Friend was 1,300. I would make a guess that the vast majority of those replies are to the effect that the document is grossly inadequate in scope. The Bill which I introduced was narrow in scope, and indeed any Bill introduced by a private


Member must be narrow because he has not the Civil Service machine behind him ; he is not allowed to spend public money. All kinds of shortcomings inhibit a private Member from introducing a Bill. The Government have no such inhibitions. However, they have not covered an enormous area in which women are discriminated against—in social insurance, in pensions, in credit facilities and in all kinds of areas in which some cases the Government are attempting to intervene.
But not only is it inadequate in scope. The enforcement procedures are grossly inadequate. In any event, they are objected to by the trade union movement and will not be accepted by the trade unions. There are far too many loopholes and exceptions. There is no doubt that even if the legislation proposed in the consultative document were enacted, there would still be enormous areas of discrimination uncovered.
There are some people—there are some in the Cabinet and certainly there are some on the Government back benches—who, like the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell), have said that the Government's proposals are a nonsense, that there is no room for legislation, and that if women are in low-paid unskilled jobs it is their own fault since the laws of the market determine that women shall be low paid and unskilled, and that we should not interfere. The Government will be in trouble with their own supporters, because the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West is not alone in expressing that sentiment. There are many political skinheads on the Tory benches who are opposed to legislation of this kind. They argue that the market forces will determine the rôle of women in employment and that in any event we have to proceed to change prejudices and attitudes by means of persuasion and education. But we have been at that game for 100 years or more and we are no further forward.
The differentials between the wages paid to men and women doing comparable jobs have remained almost unchanged for 100 years. It required a Labour Government to pass the Equal Pay Act, which comes into effect in 1975. But that will be useless unless at the same time we get on the statute book legislation dealing with discrimination in

employment, education, promotion and the rest.
I do not know how many hon. Members watched the "Panorama" programme last night. There was a discussion of the worth in terms of pay of a number of different people. There are many hon. Friends of mine who could and should have attended today's debate to make these points. The Government are now engaged in the battle against inflation. Whatever Government comes to power after the next election will have to have some kind of incomes policy and there will have to be some machinery to decide on relativities of pay as between one person and another. That was the problem being discussed on the "Panorama" programme last night.
Who appeared in the programme? There was a merchant banker—a man. There was a production consultant—a man. There was a car worker—a man. There was a miner—a man. There was a postman—a man. There was a ward sister, a nurse—

Mrs. Renée Short: The statutory woman.

Mr. Hamilton: The statutory woman, even on "Panorama". We were told in captions the weekly gross pay of each of them. The merchant banker was getting more than £288 a week, and he justified it. The production consultant was getting more than £96 a week. The car worker was getting £50 a week. The miner was getting £36·79 a week. The postman was getting £25·16 a week. The ward sister one of the most highly skilled and dedicated public servants in the country, was getting £30·11. The woman was next to bottom. But the postman, at the bottom with £25·16, thought that the merchant banker should be at the top. Heaven knows, we can do without merchant bankers. There are not many fatalities or much pneumoconiosis amongst merchant bankers.

Mr. Robert C. Brown: There is the odd caviare poisoning.

Mr. Hamilton: The odd caviare poisoning or case of gout. But it is this kind of relativity that has to be challenged, and only Government intervention can alter that.
The Government talk about 4 million workers who have settled within the terms


of phase 3. However, it is not because they liked to settle. It is because they are so weak they have to settle. They have no bargaining power. What bargaining power has the little ward sister who appeared in "Panorama" last night? She would not strike. The nurses will not strike, and all Governments know that. Therefore they can be exploited.
In the debate last week I reminded the House that when the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West was a member of a Tory Government he believed, although he does not any more, in an incomes policy. When he was at the Treasury or the Ministry of Health he told the nurses, "You will be the first to suffer. You will have to accept a 2½ per cent. increase."
If we are to have a fair society and if we are to give this half of our work force a fair deal, those who cannot protect themselves and whom the unions seem to be unwilling to protect will have to be protected by the Government. To that extent there must be more Government intervention rather than less.
It was only yesterday that we received the Government's replies to the report which my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East introduced today. In my view they are very wishy-washy. When my hon. Friend read them she must have thought, "Why have we bothered?" They are non-committal. There are 15 recommendations in the report. Some are accepted in principle, but with safeguards and qualifications.
My hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East referred to the remarks of the TUC on the recommendations. The TUC is a bit chary. It is quite condemnatory of what the report says about the protective legislation passed in the 19th century and subsequently to prevent women going into certain industries and to protect them from working excessive hours and from night work. The TUC objected to the words in the report describing this protective legislation as "ridiculous" and "antiquated".
I believe in complete equality of opportunity in employment. If women want that, they cannot opt out of anything. What woman wants to be a coalminer? If the coal board were to say that women could apply to work in a seam 18 in.

high, I doubt whether there would be many applicants. There are not many men applicants. Indeed, there would not be many dog applicants if dogs could apply. I would not send a dog down a coalmine, let alone a woman.
If we are to have complete equality of opportunity, it ought to be across the board. It ought to be complete freedom of choice with no exceptions anywhere. I agree with the Government's White Paper to the extent that the exceptions must be extremely limited, and where there is a doubt it should fall on the side of liberality rather than the other way.
The Government had paid belated lip service to equality of opportunity. It is clearly in the national interest that facilities should be made available to enable women to go out to work, if they wish. There is no compulsion about it.
No woman has yet been appointed to the European Commission. My hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East is very much anti-Common Market, but I think that we shall stay in. That being so, the Government should take the opportunity of appointing one or two women to the Commission. There has been a recent British resignation. The Prime Minister should take the opportunity of sending my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East to take up that post. That is the kind of opportunity that is available to the Government. They have many ways, short of legislation, to show that they are practising what they are now belatedly preaching.
I hope that the Procedure Committee will look carefully at the way that we handle these debates. We ought to have more opportunities in the House to debate Select Committee reports. Otherwise, the valuable information that is available to the House will not be used to full advantage.
Technically, we have three days each session to debate Select Committee reports. That was decided by the former right hon. Member for Saffron Walden, now Lord Butler, at a time when there were fewer Select Committees than today. I think that the Leader of the House should consider the possibility of morning sittings to debate Select Committee reports, because it is clear from attendance at these debates—I have attended


many—that hon. Members who attend are extremely interested. It might be worth trying the experiment of morning sittings for debates on Select Committee reports. At any rate, the attendance would be no worse than it is today.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,
That this House takes note of the Fourth, Sixth and Seventh Reports from the Expenditure Committee in the last Session of Parliament.

EXPENDITURE COMMITTEE (ROLE)

6.13 p.m.

Sir Henry d'Avigdor-Goldsmid: I beg to move,
That this House takes note of the rôle of the Expenditure Committee, with particular reference to staff, broadcasting of proceedings, reporting by Sub-Committees, and other matters contained in the Second Special Report on Session 1970–71, the Sixth Special Report of Session 1971–72, the Second and Fourth Special Reports of the last Session of Parliamentand in the Minutes of Evidence taken on 9th April 1973.
It is appropriate that I should begin by thanking the Opposition for putting a Supply day at the disposal of the Expenditure Committee for these debates.
I am glad that the hon. Member for Fife, West (Mr. William Hamilton), who is an assiduous attendant at Expenditure Committee debates, should be here today to liven up our proceedings, although he did go a bit wide, even for him. I shall not follow him up all those attractive byways. I recall the days when he was Chairman of the Estimates Committee and the very good work that he did.
Although we have a sparse attendance we need not underline it. The mere fact of having a debate has produced a remarkable degree of alacrity from the Department of Employment. Until the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mrs. Renée Short) produced her report and the Expenditure Committee chose it for debate, I think that these papers were well buried. I do not know how much dust they were gathering or how busy the Department was—I am sure that it was intensely busy—but it managed to produce the papers in time and get the reply in. Therefore, we should be glad that the debate has produced a reply from the Government.
The hon. Member for Fife, West referred to the pressure on the time of the House, a matter of which we are all aware. It seems extraordinary that we should have a week like this when nothing seems to go on and then days when there is debate after debate and Committee proceedings and it is difficult for any conscientious hon. Member to get to bed at a reasonable time. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that there should be an inquiry by the Leader of the House and his staff into the way that time on the Floor is divided. However, I am not yet convinced that the Expenditure Committee as such deserves or requires many extra days.
The hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Sheldon), who is Chairman of the General Sub-Committee, is bound to get at least one day, if not two days—one on the Budget and another on expenditure forecasts.
The day that we have been allotted is not what would be called fashionable, being the first day after the House returns from the Christmas Recess. The timing was unfortunate in some ways. For instance, the hon. Member for Stockton-on-Tees (Mr. William Rodgers), who, with his industrious sub-committee, has completed one report on regional development incentives, which has been through the main committee, has another one which I understand is on its way to the main committee. Had the debate been postponed by a fortnight I believe that we could easily have had a day on the report on regional development incentives, which would have been a very good subject. But it is asking too much, even of a Government as gifted as ours, to suggest that we should debate a report that has not yet reached their hands.
Therefore, although the timing is not too happy, with the agreement of the members of my Committee I thought that we might use half of this day for an inquest on the Expenditure Committee which has existed for three years. We have had sufficient time and experience to draw some useful conclusions, and, with the permission of the House, I should like to begin by going into a little history, most of which is contained in the Green Paper of October 1970, Command 4507.
We owe a great deal to the inventive brain and activity of the right hon. Member for Coventry, East (Mr. Crossman) who was concerned that many hon. Members seemed to have so little to do. Accepting that there are about 600 Members, of whom 100 are engaged on Government business and another 50 on Opposition Front Bench business, 450 Members are left with nothing to do except to vote. Therefore, the right hon. Member for Coventry, East thought, probably with a measure of reason, that if he could find them some harmless activity it would be conducive to building up a contented tempo in this House.
The Select Committee on Procedure, which started in 1965, no doubt at the right hon. Gentleman's prompting, recommended that there should be a new Select Committee to examine how the Departments of State carried out their responsibilities, to consider the estimates of expenditure, and to report. However, that recommendation was not accepted.
We then go to December 1966, when once again this went to the Procedure Committee and it recommended that there should be a number of Select Committees—science and technology, race relations, immigration, Scottish affairs, education and science, agriculture and overseas aid. In the main, those suggestions were adopted.
In December 1968, the Select Committee on Procedure was invited to make further inquiries into the examination by the House of Commons of public expenditure and the choice of priorities. The Committee published a report in July 1969 in which it recommended a procedure for considering public expenditure and examining the form of paper presented to the House. The Committee recommended a general subcommittee of 16 members, and eight sub-committees each of nine members, which might be a total of anything up to 80 members.
I should like to state what the Committee considered to be the rôle of the General Sub-Committee. It was to scrutinise the projection of public sector expenditure as a whole after the annual debate on the Expenditure White Paper, to consider the adequacy of the material provided and to give an account to the House of the working of sub-committees. It would guide the work of the Committee

as a whole and co-ordinate the inquiries undertaken with the work of other Select Committees.
That was a fairly rigorous directive, and when there was a change of Government responsibility for the leadership of the House fell to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Employment who, having graduated to that post from the job of Patronage Secretary, cast a rather cooler eye on the activities of these committees. Anyway, he dwelt upon these matters and produced a Green Paper to which I have already referred—Cmnd. 4507 of October 1970—and that was debated on 12th November 1970.
I should like to go back to that debate for a while, because my right hon. Friend who was then Leader of the House said
that, as a result, a major Select Committee on Expenditure with a comprehensive set of functional sub-committees was not a feasible proposition."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 12th November 1970; Vol. 806, c. 620.]
That was his conclusion, and accordingly the Green Paper suggested that alongside the Select Committee which I have mentioned there should be a more modest form of Select Committee on Expenditure which might have about 45 members, which is the number that we have now.
It would have a wider rôle than the old Estimates Committee and would keep under examination the projections of public expenditure made available to the House. It would be free to consider the policy behind the figures, and therefore might sometimes wish to examine Ministers on them. That, basically, is the directive on which the Expenditure Committee has been functioning.
During that debate the former Member for Kingston-upon-Thames, now Lord Boyd-Carpenter, complimented the then Leader of the House and said:
As one would expect of the late captain of the Royal and Ancient, my right hon. Friend has gone pretty well straight down the middle of fairway and has avoided all but perhaps one or two of the bunkers."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 12th November 1970; Vol. 806, c. 630.]
Not being very cognisant with golf, it seems to me that that is an odd shot to play—one that goes into one or two bunkers but ends up on the fairway. But that probably is what he did, and my criticism of my right hon. Friend's conclusion is that he underclubbed himself.


He did not hit the ball as far as it could have been hit at the time. My right hon. Friend's native caution reasserted itself. Because of his experience as Patronage Secretary, he felt unwilling to commit large numbers of Members of the House to a form of activity, which I should almost describe as Stakhanovite.
On 22nd January 1971 the Committee was set up with its sub-committees and a steering sub-committee, and the Committee had the wisdom to elect as its chairman my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann). I think one can say that my right hon. Friend played an important part in getting the Committee off the ground, and as his successor I should like to express my gratitude to him for all the work that he did then. No doubt his labours on the Expenditure Committee were all too much for him. He retired in the autumn of 1971 and I was invited to succeed him.
This debate deals with a number of points which hon. Members have raised from time to time and I do not propose, as it were, to get in their way. The subjects mentioned on the Order Paper are staff, broadcasting of proceedings and reporting by sub-committees. I shall make only a brief reference to each of those matters, except staff, because I know that hon. Members have important contributions on these subjects on which they have strong views. They had the opportunity of expressing most of their views to my right hon. Friend the Lord President of the Council, who is with us today, when my right hon. Friend visited the Committee in April 1972. A number of points were put to him, all of which he dealt with to his own satisfaction, if not to that of members of the committee.
The hon. Member for Dudley (Dr. Gilbert) made the most original contribution to that discussion, because he is on record as saying that although he voted against the televising of the proceedings of the House he would like to see the proceedings of the sub-committee of the Expenditure Committee televised. That is almost a unique view, and I hope that my right hon. Friend the Lord President of the Council will take it into account when he replies to the debate.
I should now like to say something about reporting by sub-committees. My right hon. Friend the Lord President has expressed the view that the present situation is satisfactory. That is not the view of members of the Committee, so we have arrived at what I call a working compromise. That means that I try to ensure that there is no delay by the main Committee in dealing with the draft reports from the sub-committees, and where draft reports are agreed unanimously by the members of the sub-committee I try to discourage members of the main Committee from seeking to alter them. Members have regarded that as a reasonable arrangement, but it does not seem to be logical or sensible, and that again is something which some of my colleagues may wish to raise.
The subject of staff is an old Expenditure Committee red herring. In his speech, to which I have referred, my noble Friend Lord Boyd-Carpenter, speaking from his experience as former Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, said,
If the new committee is to work efficiently, this is not just a question of giving it one or two extra clerks on the establishment of the department of the learned Clerk of the House. It involves equipping it with a real investigatory staff of its own. We are kidding ourselves if we think that an assembly of very busy Members of this House with, as we know, many other commitments and obligations, sitting perhaps twice a week for a couple of hours can possibly get at what is referred to in the Green Paper as…' the reasons and policies behind figures…".—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 12th November 1970; Vol. 806, c. 632.]
In general this line was also taken up by the Expenditure Committee in its Second Report of 1970–71, paragraphs 24–32. It is an argument that can be overdone. We are not a committee of audit—I am glad to see the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee present and probably he would agree—but a committee of inquiry.
I do not believe that our task would be immensely facilitated if we had 10 times as many staff. At present we have learned Clerks of the House and the inestimable advantage of the help of our specialist advisers. Every sub-committee has such advice. The specialist advisers have rendered valuable service to us.
I do not see how it would be feasible, unless we were prepared to keep them unemployed indefinitely, to employ a vast staff of specialist advisers unless they knew on what topics they were to give advice. In my experience, the specialist advisers from whose services we have benefited, have been up to their work and have made an enormous contribution to the work of the sub-committees, mainly because they were especially the best people for the job. We are able to call upon these high-class specialist advisers and they do the job not for the remuneration, which is not important to them, but because they think their work is appreciated and published.
There is also the problem of accommodation. There is not room for a large new department. What would we do with all the people involved? A number of hon. Members who take an interest in this work are present today. They would agree that their work would not be greatly facilitated if they had four times as many clerks. There are times when an additional clerk is useful. The hon. Member for Stockton-on-Tees acquired the use of an additional clerk and used him to the best advantage with great zeal when he took on the South African inquiry before completing his report on regional development incentives.
I am not ashamed to say that I have had advice of the Clerk to the Committee who said,
Where Sub-Committees stick mainly to general principles of expenditure, or overall monitoring, there may be scope for long-term specialist staff.
This is especially the case in connection with the General Sub-Committee where the services of Mr. Wynne Godley of the Cambridge Department of Applied Economics have been invaluable. I do not wish to belittle the extremely good work of that sub-committee and its Chairman, but Mr. Wynne Godley's contribution has been admirable. In the sub-committee we had Brigadier Kenneth Hunt of the Institute of Strategic Studies. It is called the Defence and Foreign Affairs Sub-Committee, but if it should switch its interest from defence to foreign affairs then Brigadier Hunt's use value would be reduced. In that event some other adviser would be more appropriate.

Mr. George Cunningham: The answer to that problem

is to have two committees, one for defence and one for foreign affairs.

Sir H. d'Avigdor-Goldsmid: I shall mention other specialist advisers who have done us well. There is Mr. Murray Stewart of the University of Kent who has worked on the new towns for the Environment Sub-Committee. We have not yet seen its report but I understand that it is going well. There is Mr. Gareth Williams of Lancaster University who has worked with the Education Sub-Committee on higher education. Lastly, Mr. John Knight of the Oxford Institute of Economics and Statistics has worked on the South African inquiry with the hon. Member for Stockton-on-Tees. It is a satisfactory marriage between a highly skilled specialist adviser and a chairman who takes trouble, who is productive and who is liable to produce the sort of results that this committee should be able to show to the House.
I do not sympathise with the usual complaints that the committees are understaffed. It is true that the sub-committee clerks have to work very hard, especially as they have other duties in the House, I wonder sometimes how they manage to do them, but they do. I have not been aware over the past two years that the quality of the reports which the committee has produced has been less than satisfactory to the House. They have been extremely good, and they are the work of individual clerks.
What conclusions can we come to from three years' experience of this Committee? First, I suggest to the Lord President—and I believe that all my colleagues on the Committee agree with me—that it should be appointed for a Parliament and not on a sessional basis. We have known already in my chairmanship two long interruptions in work which were unnecessary. A formula has been devised for me by the clerk by which my suggestion could be adopted. I am advised that the form of resolution to keen the Committee in existence during a Parliament would be:
(a) That the Members of the Expenditure Committee nominated by the Order made on
the appropriate date
shall continue to be Members of the Committee for the remainder of this Parliament.
(b) That this Order be a Standing Order of the House".


I hope that my colleagues who agree with me will make that point because I should like to leave this as a legacy to our successors so that they may operate on a more permanent basis.
The other problem is the selection of members of sub-committees. The work of sub-committees is, mainly, carried on by the chairmen with a handful of colleagues as well as the professional assistance which they receive. Much inconvenience is caused by the fact that hon. Members are invited to join the Expenditure Committee and then find that there is no vacancy on the sub-committee on which they want to serve.
Human nature being what it is, the Defence and Foreign Affairs Sub-Committee is always over-subscribed. I do not suggest that that is because it is the sub-committee whose members do the most travelling. That would be a quite unworthy suggestion to make, and I should not put it forward. The General Sub-Committee is also over-subscribed. The result is that equally valuable and important sub-committees, such as that dealing with environmental questions, have a number of Members who attend very rarely because they are not genuinely interested in environmental problems and because basically they joined the Expenditure Committee hoping to serve on a subcommittee dealing with a topic in which they were interested.
When a new Expenditure Committee is recruited in the next Parliament, I suggest that hon. Members should be asked which sub-committee they wish to join and that before any appointments are made the usual channels should sort out the matter and produce the right mix. That would prevent much frustration.
We talk about these committees being all-party committees, but there are no Liberal Party representatives, although the Expenditure Committee consists of 45 people, and therefore on a proportional basis there would be room for a Liberal or two. One of the best chairmen of a sub-committee we had was the hon. and learned Member for Lincoln (Mr. Taverne). I should have thought that nothing in his life would do anything but enhance his value as a member of a specialist sub-committee. We act a little narrowly by confining membership of the

committee to the Government and to the Opposition.

Mr. Michael English: The hon. Member is perhaps forgetting that the Liberal Party is not very assiduous in seeking committee places, and it is the second largest opposition party.

Sir H. d'Avigdor-Goldsmid: I am obliged.
My conclusion is that the Expenditure Committee has justified its progress from being just another Estimates Committee. I think that we can be satisfied—and this is not an exercise in self-praise—with the results of three years' work. It is not outstandingly good, but the system is going about right and I am sure that that will continue as long as we can contrive to get Members interested in the work and to find them employment in the work in which they are interested—which are two different questions. The Expenditure Committee should be a permanent Committee and should not have to be chosen every Session.

6.43 p.m.

Mr. William Rodgers: I agree with a good deal of what the hon. Member for Walsall, South (Sir H. d'Avigdor-Goldsmid) has said. I shall deal later with his remarks about which I disagree.
I support the idea of appointing the Expenditure Committee not for a Session but for a Parliament, and I agree that the question of selecting Members to serve on the Committee should be given much more serious consideration. The hon. Member for Walsall, South referred mainly to the question of the membership of the sub-committee, but the appointment of Members to the Committee is still too much in the hands of the Whips. There is reason to believe that the Chief Whip or Deputy-Chief Whip says to one of his colleagues "I am sorry that I cannot send you to Strasbourg and about the CPA delegation to Barbados, but what about the sub-committee?" The Whips see the Committee as being on the fringes of patronage for the dull, dutiful, elderly and academic. That is not good enough, and I hope that experience of the Committee in the last Session and the comments of hon. Members today will


persuade the Lord President and his successors that this is an important Committee to which Members should be appointed on merit and not simply because there is nowhere else for a troublesome or boring and persistent Member to go.
Three years is a very short time in the life of a Parliament in which to judge a new institution like a Select Committee. Therefore, I agree that it is far too soon to form a conclusive view of its record and likely achievement or to decide the question of its permanence within the institutions of the House. However, this may be the last chance we shall have in this Parliament to pass an interim judgment and to make comments of which a successive Lord President and hon. Members may take account when making a decision. It is therefore reasonable that we should use this occasion to make our own rather personal assessments.
I have been fortunate enough to be a member of the Expenditure Committee from its inception. I am particularly grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Dr. David Owen), as a result of whose urging I tentatively put my name forward to the Whips, believing that I was not dull, dutiful, elderly or academic but simply someone who thought that it might be a vehicle by which he could serve the House. During that time I have been Chairman of the Trade and Industry Sub-Committee and inevitably my views are coloured by that experience, although what I say will not necessarily reflect even the views of the individual members of the subcommittee. Others will see the matter differently.
However, the important fact—this bears on what the hon. Member for Walsall, South said—is that in a sense the Expenditure Committee barely has a life of its own. We are all essentially members of mini Expenditure Committees. That is where we make our contributions and achieve our satisfaction. It is a measure of how far the Whips have been out of touch that they have tended to judge the performance of Members by the frequency of their attendance at the rather formal and, happily, brief meetings of the Expenditure Committee rather than in terms of their contributions to the subcommittee. It is in the sub-committees that the real work is done.
Being chairman of a sub-committee has been a thoroughly rewarding experience for me, even exhilarating at times, though that may surprise Members who have not served on sub-committees, and totally worth while. I shall continue to feel in retrospect that the past three years have been one of the best or most satisfying periods I will have served in my parliamentary life. Whether we have wholly fulfilled the expectations of our sponsors—those who first thought that the Expenditure Committee would have a rôle—is a different matter. On balance, almost certainly we have not. We have in some respects evolved rather differently from the way they intended.
For that reason, I am not sure that any hon. Member who served on the Select Committee on Procedure and was responsible for the report of 1968–69 from which the Expenditure Committee stems will necessarily feel that we have moved always in the right direction. But this is not true of the General Sub-Committee under the leadership first of the hon. and learned Member for Lincoln (Mr. Taverne), to whose contribution I should like to pay tribute, and now of my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Sheldon), who has been devoted to his rôle as chairman.
The General Sub-Committee has largely fulfilled the expectations that people held for the Committee as a whole, but I am not sure that other sub-committees have followed the course then charted for them. We have been feeling our way, evolving our respective rôles, and if we have fallen short there is no obstacle to our redeeming ourselves in the future.
I have two broad observations to make. First, to be a strong supporter of an increased rôle for Select Committees does not mean a denial of the central rôle of the Chamber as the heart of Parliament's work. There used to be arguments that one was for one or the other and that those who chose to serve on Select Committees did not feel entirely at home in the atmosphere of the Chamber. That is not the case. Second, it should be noted that, for a Select Committee to be a success, it must lean some way in its choice of inquiry and methods of work to satisfy the natural vanity of Members of Parliament.
On the first point, at a time when, by common consent, the public are disillusioned by what they see as the excuses of party politics, which will become more excessive shortly, it is a good thing that Members should be seen to be working harmoniously together without striking attitudes. If, as a result, the debate in the Chamber is better informed, we shall not be criticised for this either. This is why I see the work of the Chamber and that of the Select Committees essentially in parallel.
Second, it is unrealistic to expect MPs as a whole to be enthusiastic to serve in only a dull background routine, but there is no need for Select Committees to be engaged only in the dull and the routine. In practice it will be seen that many of these sub-committees have had an excellent attendance. During the first inquiry of the Trade and Industry Sub-Committee, we had 52 meetings and an average attendance of seven out of eight members. You would be surprised, Mr. Speaker, and probably rather bothered, by such a high percentage attendance in debates in the Chamber. You would be equally surprised to find that number of Members sitting down for two hours at a stretch without always themselves joining in the debate. We have never had a problem of getting a quorum in our sub-committee.
I have summed this up before—perhaps it is appropriate, although the phrase may sound odd—by saying that our inquiries must have some "sex appeal". In other words, they must deal with live and interesting issues upon which it is possible to take evidence from influential and significant people in public life and produce a report to which people pay attention. It is unrealistic for the Expenditure Committee and its six sub-committees or any successor arrangement of Select Committees to proceed without bearing that in mind.
I am delighted to see present tonight my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Dell), and I therefore mention the Public Accounts Committee at this point. We may need to define more clearly the boundaries between the Committee of which he is a distinguished chairman and the Expenditure Committee and its sub-committees. I should like to see a concordat between the two which in due course was endorsed by the

House. It is not the job of either Committee to do what the other can do better. We should avoid straying into areas with which the other is more competent to deal.
I should like to feel that it is the Expenditure Committee's task to deal with future policy and to review the Public Expenditure White Paper in all its policy implications, while the Public Accounts Committee continues its scrutiny, as it has done over the years, of expenditure incurred. I agree, however, that this may not be a satisfactory line of demarcation and I hope that, under the auspices of the Lord President, when the successor Committees are set up an arrangement will be reached which makes good sense.
What is the overwhelming characteristic of the evolution of the Expenditure Committee over the last three years? It is the extent to which the sub-committees have asserted their own independence. More and more the Expenditure Committee has been an umbrella, held with kindly tolerance by the hon. Member for Walsall, South. He said just now that he has been happy to see the subcommittees evolving in their own way and to see the convention established that the Expenditure Committee does not amend reports from sub-committees when they are unanimous.
There is a strong body of opinion, as the hon. Member said, which feels that sub-committees should in effect report straight to the House. I am in favour of the maximum freedom for sub-committees to achieve their own purpose in their own way.
The logic of this may be that we should have, not six sub-committees of an Expenditure Committee but six principal Select Committees which would deal with the areas with which the sub-committees now deal. This deserves serious examination. My instinct is that the General Sub-Committee now chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne should increasingly take over the rôle which would flow from the course that it has pursued, envisaged for the original Expenditure Committee—that of examining the Public Expenditure White Paper, seeking to improve it and looking into different areas in which money is spent. Perhaps also, if not all, at least some of the other sub-committees should


be constituted with 10 to 16 members as Select Committees.
It is categorically impossible for the Trade and Industry Sub-Committee—I refer to it only because of my familiarity with it—of eight Members to produce more than one substantial report in a year. With luck, we shall have produced three reports by the end of this Parliament, but large areas are inevitably neglected. My sub-committee has been responsible among other things for agriculture, but by the end of this Parliament, after three or more years of life, we will never have examined a question related to this important sector of public expenditure, simply because there is not enough time.
Equally—here I accept the criticism of my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne—we have not scrutinised the Estimates or given enough time to the annual Public Expenditure White Paper. Sub-committees of the Expenditure Committee or successor Committees of 12 to 16 members should be able to do three things: conduct a major inquiry, take evidence on and examine the Estimates and the Public Expenditure White Paper and conduct short sharp ad hoc inquiries as they arise. It is not possible for any sub-committee of eight Members to carry out all these responsibilities. It is unrealistic, if we visualise Select Committees working in parallel with the Chamber, for Members to give more than two half-days to a Select Committee in addition to all the reading and, in some cases, the travel which may be involved.
For example, why should not the Select Committee dealing with trade and industry matters—a sub-committee now ; a full Committee, perhaps, later—examine the secondary banking system, or aspects of public policy in relation to industry which are now dealt with by the Companies Bill? These are proper subjects of scrutiny. It may well be that many matters which appear in the Companies Bill, the Second Reading of which we are to debate on Thursday, would have benefited by the scrutiny of an appropriate all-party Select Committee of the House before they reached the form that the Bill now takes.
On the question of staff, I place the emphasis in a rather different way than did the hon. Member for Walsall, South.

I am certainly not in favour of a sudden and massive recruitment of staff in order to say that we have as many people working for us as work for my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead on the Public Accounts Committee. That would be a very silly way to proceed. It flows from what I have said earlier, however, that it is essential that, if Committees are to be free to proceed and if they are in due course to fulfil the three rôles that I have indicated, there should be no impediment, whether in terms of the Clerks who do such excellent work for us now, of the specialist advisers or of a supporting staff of considerable size. Even if the Committees are larger, it will make a very great demand on the time of Members unless we have the sort of staff who can examine the Estimates for us and can look at the Public Expenditure White Paper and discuss the detailed implications of both with officials responsible for Government Departments. We ought to be moving in that direction.
As Members of Parliament are not experts, we should not try to be experts. Members of Parliament are people who ought to know how to use experts. That is why there should be no obstacle to the recruitment of either specialist staff or a permanent body of experts who can help the Expenditure Committee as a whole.
We should also review our facilities. There are times when I am amazed by how far the basic facilities of this House fall behind those available to a modest business of any kind outside. Problems such as the rapid dispatch of a large number of letters are normally beyond the resources of the House. In this respect it is true that we have still not moved from the quill pen age. There is also room for a more relaxed approach to the question of the travel of members of the Expenditure Committee. I think I am right in saying that until lately it has been the case that a sub-committee had to travel as a whole, and there was no question of one, two or three members of a sub-committee having permission to travel on its behalf. I hope that that will be changed and that, here again, there will be a high degree of flexibility.
On the subject of broadcasting, I do not quite agree with the hon. Member for Walsall, South. He referred to the views of my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Dr. Gilbert) as unique, implying


that there was, perhaps, something rather odd—if I did not misunderstand the hon. Member—in Select Committees being televised before the House itself. I do not share that view. There may be a serious case, given proper safeguards, for televising or at least broadcasting the proceedings of Select Committees before the House itself feels that it is in a position to make a decision. I would not like the fact that one holds a view on one of these matters to rule out the possibility of holding a different view on the other. Although this evening we probably cannot examine that at length, I hope that the new Select Committee, when it is appointed in the next Parliament, will be able to discuss this matter sympathetically with the Lord President of the time.

Mr. Edmund Dell: My hon. Friend mentioned the need for safeguards if the proceedings of Select Committees were televised. Does he include within the idea of safeguards the possibility of safeguards for non-ministerial witnesses at Select Committees?

Mr. Rodgers: Indeed, I was including that. When I said "safeguards" I had in mind not that the present proceedings of sub-committees of the Select Committees were behind closed doors. On the contrary, the openness of our proceedings is one of our advantages. Certainly the Committee dealing with trade and industry has made clear at all times that the only evidence it was prepared to receive was evidence given to it in public. But we must recognise that the intrusion—I use that word guardedly—of television may make it more difficult at some times for witnesses to provide the information wanted by a sub-committee, in an atmosphere which must be strange to them in the first place. When I used the word "safeguards" I was thinking not necessarily in a legal way but in terms of not interfering with the proper procedures of sub-committees. These are matters to be examined. The problems can be overcome. The plea that I was making, however, was that the question of broadcasting or televising the proceedings of Select Committees should be examined on its merits and not simply dismissed as something that ought to be considered in relation to any decision to televise or broadcast proceedings of the House.
The Expenditure Committee has earned the right to be regarded as an institution which has a great prospect for development. I should like to believe that we have been pushing the frontiers forward and helping in the evolution of Parliament in a way which is essential to Parliament's survival. I am not as impatient as some of my hon. Friends with the speed of progress, but I believe that the momentum of the Committee must be kept up, otherwise it could become ineffective and an experiment which should become permanent could in the end fail.

7.7 p.m.

Mr. Robert Sheldon: The House will have listened to my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton-on-Tees (Mr. William Rodgers) with great interest when he spoke about the importance of the work of the Procedure Committee from which the Expenditure Committee finally emerged. The hon. Member for Walsall, South (Sir H. d'Avigdor-Goldsmid) also referred to that important work. He put the view that the outline scheme suggested by the Procedure Committee was a vigorous view of the rôle of the Expenditure Committee. This is right. It was expected when these things were first debated that the Expenditure Committee would come to play a part in the discussion and the survey of public expenditure rather greater than I believe it has so far played. I do not believe that we have anywhere near fulfilled the hopes and expectations of that Procedure Committee. That is a matter to which I shall return later.
On the question of staff, we have very great difficulty in obtaining from Government Departments the kind of information we require. That is not necessarily due to their lack of will in giving us the information. It is because we are extending, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton-on-Tees said, the area of information, and this will obviously be a matter of some difficulty to us. What we really require, however, is our own system of information gathering. It is not enough to have the specialist advisers other than in those areas in which the Expenditure Committee is behaving as the old Estimates Committee.
Clearly, if the Expenditure Committee behaves in the same way as the old


Estimates Committee behaved—that is, looking just at one particular expert field—we must have specialist advisers because we are dealing with only a narrow subject on which the Expenditure Committee is considering action. But if we look at the continuing work of each of the sub-committees, the work in comparing forecasts with outturn, monitoring the outputs of each of the Departments, making sure that they understand and accept the reasons for changes in the priorities and making sure that the subcommittees act as part of the great pressure groups of opinion in these matters, we see that clearly there will be a need for the continuous advice that can be obtained by a permanent technical staff gathering strength year by year in finding its way through the maze of public expenditure.
It was that point that was referred to in the Second Special Report of the Expenditure Committee, which was printed on 10th June 1971. It is significant to note the date because it was at a time when we were still talking about an Expenditure Committee as an Expenditure Committee, before we had started to descend into the old Estimates Committee form. At that time we were talking about the rôle of staff in monitoring expenditure, to be able to see the way in which the Government were directing and redirecting their expenditure, to take account of the different priorities which they established, but which did not necessarily reflect the priorities of the particular sub-committees.
It is that kind of staff that will bring to the attention of each of the members of the sub-committee what the Government are actually doing in public expenditure—for instance, whether they are spending more on nursery schools than on other forms of education ; whether this is a good thing, and where resources are being directed—and ask the sub-committee for its view on these matters. That kind of continuing work will require an increase in specialist staff.
The hon. Member for Walsall, South is right in saying that if a Committee proceeds as an Estimates Committee it does not require much increase in staff because it will obtain the specialist advisers required.
I turn now to the relatively small matter of the direct reports of subcommittees. It is quite absurd that the whole Expenditure Committee, each time a report comes before it, should take responsibility for that report. None of us has time—I certainly have not—to go through a report in detail, let alone weigh up all the mountains of evidence. It should be enough for the report to represent the views of those members who took evidence and who weighed up the information which came before them.
We need to introduce the convention of the minority report. It need not necessarily be an appendix to each report, nor do I believe that we need to stress as much in the future as we do now the need for unanimity in reports of this kind. If we are ever to play an important rôle in decisions on public expenditure, it is clear that there will be divisions of opinion. The matter is what fundamentally divides the House. A large part of Parliament's job is considering where we raise the money, from which section of the community we raise it, to which section of the community we give it and how we spend our money on goods and services on behalf of each member of the community.
It is clear that in such a situation there will be divisions of opinion. This does not mean that we necessarily need to have a House of Commons type debate in that sub-committee. It means that in the report of the sub-committee it can be stated that Messrs. A, B and C believe so-and-so and that Messrs. D, E, F and G believe something else. The report could then revert to the unanimity that is usual in these matters. After all, Royal Commissions are beginning to act in this way, realising that unanimity on broad areas can reflect spurious unanimity. The Fulton Committee had many such provisos, on minor matters in the main, whereby people were able to express differences of opinion. If those differences can be expressed in such a report, it is even easier in expenditure reports.

Mr. English: When my hon. Friend suggests introducing a convention, I take it that he is merely saying that Members should make a minority report if they wish. As I am sure he realises, all that a Member has to do in order to have a


minority report—if that is what it is—printed with a majority report is simply to table it. Even if it is defeated, it will be printed in the same book. My right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, West (Mr. C. Pannell) did that in the Privileges Committee. Rather surprisingly, what he intended to table as a minority report became a majority report, because he won his case. But whether a Member wins or loses, it will still be printed with the report.

Mr. Sheldon: I am aware of that. I have done such a thing with my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Royton (Mr. Joel Barnett) in the Select Committee on Tax Credits, but it is an artificial way of operating and it is so much easier to see it in the context of the report itself, so that it follows as one reads the text.
There is no need to avoid party political subjects in these matters. If the Committee is to play an important rôle, these are areas in which we must engage. If the Expenditure Committee is to be a body which examines priorities and the way in which Governments make their choices, we must enter these areas, as was foreseen so long ago. I agree with much that my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton-on-Tees said about broadcasting. I believe in the broadcasting of the proceedings of the House. I accept that broadcasting the proceedings of Select Committees is a quite different matter. An explanation would be needed of much of what was broadcast to enable the public to understand many of our complex problems in Select Committees. If the work of the Expenditure Committee is fundamentally to reflect the kind of expenditure which people require so that it can bring its own pressure to bear on the Government, there must be that educative process. That works back to the public, from which all impetus is derived. I do not believe that there would be anything like the distorting effect which could arise if proceedings of the House were televised.
The main argument against televising the House has always been that certain people may take advantage of it in ways which we know. It cannot be said that the same would apply in the televising or broadcasting of Select Committees, which can be looked at separately. In any case, before it was decided to broadcast

the proceedings of Select Committees on a regular basis there would have to be an experiment. That would be the first step.

The Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons (Mr. James Prior): When the hon. Gentleman speaks of televising Select Committees, does he mean televising the whole of the proceedings or an edited version? In the United States the whole of the proceedings are often televised. Is he considering that, or has he in mind an edited programme such as "Tonight in Parliament"? Is he thinking of '' Tonight in Committee "?

Mr. Sheldon: My view is that the television cameras should be switched on and that the broadcasting companies would be able to use whatever version they wished. In the main it would be an edited version, but at certain times it would be a live version. The broadcasting companies would be able to decide what they needed, but in the main it would be only a few items arising from the day's business.
Therefore, the case for an experiment in televising or broadcasting the proceedings of Select Committees is that much stronger than the case for broadcasting the proceedings of the House, because the disadvantages are nowhere near as evident. It would enable Members to become more familiar with such disadvantages as there may be as well as with the advantages.

Sir H. d'Avigdor-Goldsmid: The hon. Gentleman will remember that the matter was discussed in Committee. Although a majority of Members were in favour of the proposal, quite a substantial minority were opposed to it. I believe that those present today represent those who were in favour of broadcasting the proceedings, but it was not a unanimous view of the Committee.

Mr. Sheldon: I do not think anyone wished to say that it was unanimous ; it was obviously the majority view, and that is all one would wish to claim.

Dame Irene Ward: I was opposed to the proposal, and I am here tonight.

Mr. Sheldon: The House will take note of that observation.
I came on to the Expenditure Committee at the beginning of 1971. when it was set up. I came from the Public Accounts Committee, of which I had been a member for nearly six years, because I believed it to be the most important Select Committee. I am reluctant to say it, but I now doubt whether that was necessarily the wisest move I made at that time. My reasons for the move derived from the First Report of the Select Committee on Procedure, which gave what the Committee felt were the advantages for setting up the Expenditure Committee. It showed what might be possible and it gave what came to be, if not a blueprint for, at least a fairly close approximation to the kind of examination of expenditure that we grew to understand.
If we consider the work over the past three years, I do not think any of us can deny that, other than the work of the General Sub-Committee, which has a special brief, almost everything that has been done could have been done under the Estimates Committee. Although so much of the work is excellent—I pay tribute to the excellent reports—I am also aware of the excellence of so many reports published under the aegis of the old Estimates Committee. If this were all that was required, nobody could say that we had been the success that had been expected.
I believe that the success of the Expenditure Committee will be determined by how far we shape our choices, how the priorities of expenditure are determined. I should like to quote from paragraph 75 of the Plowden Committee, which was quoted in its turn by the Procedure Committee. The Plowden Committee said in 1961:
Unless the issues of long-term expenditure priorities and policies can be discussed in Parliament and become the subject of public controversy it will be difficult for Governments to carry public opinion with them.
It felt then that the necessary ingredient of choice was to be public opinion, but I do not believe we can say that we have succeeded in mobilising it. If the Expenditure Committee is to perform its rôle, it must speak on behalf of certain sectional interests. It must find a way of dealing with those sectional interests so that it can bring their views to bear upon Government changes and choices.
I should like to see the situation, which arises all too rarely, of individuals and organisations writing to sub-committees and individual Members on the subcommittees of the Expenditure Committee to seek their support, to persuade them of the rightness of the views of the interests involved. It is when we come to the division between those who want more schools and those who want more housing, with Members of Parliament devising ways of reconciling their claims, that we can see the kind of success that many of us hoped to achieve from the setting up of the Committee.
We are very grateful for the work of the Departments that we interview. We unquestionably take a great deal of their time, but we understand that they accept the necessity. I must tell the Treasury, which has been the recipient of so much questioning from me, that although we may sometimes appear as opponents it is only through direct and vigorous questioning that we can discover the quality of administration. By getting Departments to defend themselves, we can find out the true situation.
Here I should like to say something about the main aim of the Committee. In paragraph 35 at page xvi of its First Report, the Select Committee on Procedure gives the basic object of the subcommittees. It is useful to compare what was expected from them with what has been achieved. The report said:
The task…would be threefold.
(a) It should, first, study the expenditure projections for the Department or Departments in its field, compare them with those of previous years "—
that is not done—
and report on any major variations or important changes of policy "—
that is not done—
and on the progress made by the Departments towards clarifying their general objectives and priorities.
That is not done.
(b) It should examine in as much detail as possible the implications in terms of public expenditure of the policy objectives "—
that is not done—
chosen by Ministers and assess the success of the Departments in attaining them.
That is done frequently, but not invariably.

Mr. J. Grimond: I am wholly in sympathy with what the


hon. Gentleman has been saying. I suppose the objection to his view and mine would be that if the Committee goes much further in that direction it will be encroaching on the ground of the executive. Has the hon. Gentleman any answer to that? We have an extremely thin House—1 plead guilty myself—examining the reports of the Committee. If it is to take an active part in important policy decisions and compare housing and, say, schools, which I should like to see it do, we must somehow or other enable Parliament to be more fully aware of what the Committee is doing.

Mr. Sheldon: That was the whole purpose of the establishment of the Expenditure Committee. The comparison of Government expenditure was not being done by the Cabinet pre-Plowden. Post-Plowden it was done by the Cabinet, but it was done inadequately. That was realised, and the suggestion was made that it was the task of Members of Parliament, but that Members, interested only in sectional choices, could not look at the situation as a whole. Therefore, the idea put forward by the Procedure Committee was that a Committee could do part of the work.
There are a number of sceptics. I see my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Dell), who in the past has rightly pointed out the difficulty of achieving the objective. There have been people who have said that it cannot be done. I still believe that, if we are to bring pressure to bear on the executive, this is the only way of doing it. It will not be possible for Parliament as a whole to act in this way. It might be possible if a Committee—the Expenditure Committee—were to act in this way.
I return to the task of the subcommittee as outlined in the First Report of the Select Committee on Procedure in 1968–69. It said:
(c) It should enquire, on the lines of the present Estimates Sub-Committees, into Departmental administration, including effectiveness of management.
That is the work of the Estimates Committee, and it is the work that has continued unchanged. It is the concentration on the old and the reluctance, or almost total failure, of sub-committees other than the General Sub-Committee to take account of the new that has been the

most serious fact of the first three years of the work of the Expenditure Committee.
Following conversations and discussions that we have had recently in the Expenditure Committee, I know it is hoped that each of the sub-committees will now take account of the White Paper on the changes in policy and the variations in decisions of Government concerning public expenditure. As a result of the work of our specialist advisers, each of the sub-committees will be given some small account of the main changes in expenditure in the areas of Government spending covered by each of the subcommittees. That I welcome. However, we are still at a very early stage in obtaining from the Government the information we require, let alone the concentration of our understanding as to what each of the members of the subcommittees wants to see done in his own particular area.
I should like to deal with the question of secrecy, and if I am a little "hobby-horsical" in this matter I hope I may be forgiven. This important aspect of assistance from Government Departments must be dealt with. There is so much that Government Departments could give to the sub-committees were it not for the obsession with secrecy which still prevails. Of course I understand the question of the economic forecasts which are a particular bone of contention with the General Sub-Committee. However, I believe that the Civil Service must bear a great deal of the responsibility for the failure to give information to the subcommittees and to hon. Members generally.
I am not surprised that each new administration devotes itself publicly to claiming that there will be greater openness with Government secrets and Government information. Each time this lofty thought tends to be dissipated during the period of office. The main reason for the lack of information is the civil servants to whom openness would present great problems. It is much easier for them to make their decisions unhurried and to consult quietly. They are able to come to a better quality of decision without the interference or interruptions of democratic views. I recall many Ministers making the claim that there would be greater openness in Government


but under pressure of events they submitted to arguments that allowed them little scope for extending this openness in Government.
If there were much greater openness, much of the work of the subcommittees would be very much easier. If Government Departments were to take sub-committees more fully into their confidence, I do not doubt that it would be easier to examine what Governments were deciding.
The Expenditure Committee was set up on 22nd January 1971. It was established on the understanding that the essence of public expenditure concerned choice. The Plowden Report of 1961 stated in paragraph 105:
Our proposals are designed to lead gradually to greater public interest in the priorities of expenditure, to the stimulation of academic thought about it, and to greater awareness of the implications and choices involved in policies as they come forward.
We have achieved some small success and I do not regard it as being very much. Changes of the kind I have mentioned would help to improve the position a little.

7.35 p.m.

Mr. Norman Fowler: I shall intervene briefly in the debate. I am not a member of the Expenditure Committee but I wish to lend my support to the proposal that the Expenditure Committee should authorise the broadcasting of its public proceedings, particularly since such support from the Tory side did not seem particularly evident in the vote that was held on the matter.
The proposal raises an important question of principle in this House. The Expenditure Committee considers important areas of policy. Employment services, which were debated earlier today, are an example. The public often take a keen interest in these and they have a vital interest in seeing debate upon them. These proceedings, however, are closed to two of the most important media—radio and television. In other words, although the Committee decides—this applies to other Committees than the Expenditure Committee—that its proceedings should be in public, only a small number of the public can have the opportunity of hearing with their own ears

and seeing with their own eyes what is taking place. They are allowed only the privilege of reading an account in a newspaper, an account which may be brief and in some cases unbalanced.
That is an extraordinary anomaly to which the House at some stage must address itself. Newspapers are allowed to report the public proceedings of the Committee, but broadcasting is excluded from doing exactly the same job and from playing exactly the same kind of rôle. It is that exclusion which seems to me to make no sense whatever. It is illogical. If there is a case for reporting the proceedings of the Committee, and presumably that case is accepted, there must also be a case for not distinguishing between the media and how they report. If that is so, two of the most powerful and most popular of the media—radio and television—should not be excluded.
I am a member of the Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration. That Committee takes evidence in public and visits cities and areas of immigrant concentration. It permits the national and local Press to hear the evidence which is given but the most extraordinary performance has to be undergone if it tries in any way to have its proceedings covered by radio or television. Members of the Committee or the chairman may comment either before the evidence has been given or afterwards, but never are the public given the chance of hearing and seeing for themselves the atmosphere of cross-questioning in which that evidence is given.
Again, it seems that the report and the proposal raise an important challenge for the House. It is important because the proposal asks the House to come to terms with broadcasting. It is important also because it asks the House to recognise that the demands of the 1970s are here and that we are not living in the 1940s or even earlier. It presents a real challenge to the House in the sense that many politicians complain—I suppose that we all do at some stage—about the gap between Parliament and the public. At the same time, we persist in excluding two of the major media from reporting directly on matters which are of vital concern to the public. In short, it is an obstinate refusal and one which is not in any sense based on logic.
I should like to see all the proceedings of the House broadcast. I should like to see our proceedings televised and put on radio. I hope that the next Parliament will take that step. Meanwhile, I think that the step which is proposed by the Committee should be given the full support of the House.

7.41 p.m.

Mr. Michael English: I am grateful to be called to speak immediately after my colleague, the hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Mr. Fowler). He is my next-door neighbour in that we are constituency neighbours. I must describe him as my benefactor as he is departing from his seat to one with a substantial Conservative majority. He is leaving behind the most Conservative portion of his constituency for the hon. Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Kenneth Clarke), who is now sitting on the Front Bench as a Whip for the Conservative Party. The hon. Member for Nottingham, South is leaving behind the most desirable Labour portions of his constituency for me. He is a benefactor to at least two others here.

Mr. Fowler: I ask the hon. Gentleman not to count his chickens before they are hatched.

Mr. English: I sincerely trust that the hon. Gentleman will take the same advice about his new constituency.
I now turn to the Sixth Special Report of 1971–72. It is one of the easier problems with which the Leader of the House will be dealing. The hon. Member for Walsall, South (Sir H. d'Avigdor-Goldsmid) rightly went back to the earlier history of the Procedure Committee's consideration of how to reform the Estimates Committee. He may recollect that I was a member of the Procedure Committee when the discussions started and when some of the reports were published.
There were a number of advocates of specialist committees. I was such an advocate and I still am. My hon. Friend the Member for Fife, West (Mr. William Hamilton) and his colleagues on the old Estimates Committee had a not unnatural reluctance to be abolished. That is what would have happened had a set of specialist committees been created. If that had been done, the old Estimates Committee would have had no function, nor indeed

would there have been any function for the Expenditure Committee if there had been set up specialist committees dealing with, for example, defence and foreign affairs or other issues. The compromise was reached of setting up the Expenditure Committee which, unlike the old Estimates Committee, could, if it wished, consider policy.
My hon. Friend the Member for Ash-ton-under-Lyne (Mr. Sheldon) has detailed what the Procedure Committee said in one of its reports. Sub-committees were created which were specialist committees. That is what they are, although I agree with my hon. Friend that they proved in practice to be more limited than was envisaged. It was then said that it was a reasonable compromise because the Expenditure Committee, with experience of of its own working, could say after a time whether it wished to continue to work in the way in which it was set up or whether, in the light of experience, it had recommendations to make to the House.
The first thing to be said about the Sixth Report is that it does exactly what the Expenditure Committee was set up to do. One of the purposes for which it was set up was to recommend how the problem should be resolved. The Committee is now putting forward a modest suggestion—namely, that a sub-committee should report directly to the House as if it were a full committee. There is a need for co-ordination between the sub-committees. For example, there could be a committee of the chairmen. There must be something to ensure that the sub-committees do not cross each other's boundaries as regards their function.
It is almost the unanimous view of the Expenditure Committee that it does not want to interfere with a sub-committee which has heard all the evidence, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton-on-Tees (Mr. William Rodgers) said, after, for example, 52 meetings, and which has produced a report which in the overwhelming number of cases is unanimous. It is the sub-committee which sees the witnessses. It is possible to read the evidence, but it is the members of the subcommittee who see the witnesses' demeanour. It is even true that the Expenditure Committee does not see a large part of the evidence of the sub-committee dealing with defence and foreign affairs because of the confidential nature of the evidence.
The Expenditure Committee does not wish to interfere with that position, but it is in an unsatisfactory position in that the principle which the chairman has been trying to inculcate cannot be adhered to under the rules of the House.
Under those rules we are responsible for something for which we do not feel we are responsible. Under the rules of the House, whether the chairman tries to discourage it or not, he cannot stop a member of his Committee tabling an amendment. For example, if I sought to table an amendment relating to the report of the sub-committee of which the hon. Member for Stockton-on-Tees is a member, the other 40-odd members, however daft they thought I was, could not stop me from doing so. They could not stop me from tabling an amendment and wasting their time. No doubt they would defeat it but they could not stop me.
That is what we wish to alter. I refer the Leader of the House to his answer to a question which I raised in the Minutes of Evidence of the Select Committee on Expenditure on Monday 9th April 1973. I asked the right hon. Gentleman, after going through the history which I have detailed, to give his views on the report. It was a good answer which he gave at the time. He said:
In the light of what has been said this afternoon, I shall have to have another look at this. One of the points made by Dr. Owen—that certainly unanimous reports by a Sub-Committee should be able to be reported direct to the House—is something that I would like to consider again and see whether or not it is possible. One wanted to build up the strength of the whole Committee and one wanted reports to have the stamp of the Expenditure Committee as a whole behind them.
They are the Lord President's views and not the views of the Expenditure Committee. The right hon. Gentleman then said:
For this reason we thought that it was right that the Committee itself only should report ; but perhaps I can consider this again. The recommendation of the Committee does not of itself have to be debated in this case but there are ways and means by which the Committee could get it debated, and I shall have to consider with my colleagues and the usual channels what the next step is to take. I would not want to go further than that.
We understood that he would not want to do so off the cuff.
When he said
We thought it was right that the Committee itself only should report.
the right hon. Gentleman was then referring to the Government memorandum on the report. Frankly, I do not think that that was ever considered. I say that as one who was concerned with the setting up of the organisation. There was created a committee and sub-committees to which the normal rules of the House applied. We said specifically that the Committee, when it was set up, could decide how it wanted to operate. We did not decide, just because there is a rule of the House which says that a sub-committee has to report to the Expenditure Committee, that that was the only way to proceed. We thought that that is how the matter should start but that afterwards the Expenditure Committee should decide all the details.
I hope that after considering this the Lord President will look favourably upon the suggestion. It seems a small thing which in no way interferes with the normal practice of the House. It is justifiable to ask, if the Expenditure Committee wishes to work in this way, why should the House or the Government wish to stop it?
I turn now to broadcasting. I voted in favour of the Second Special Report on broadcasting to come out in the 1972–73 Session. I did so on the general principle that, like the hon. Member for Nottingham, South, I have been in favour of this proposal for as long as I have been in this House—since 1964. I did it only for that reason, because I believe the Committee did not fully discuss the problems that arise from it. The Second Special Report of the Committee is simply one sentence, to the effect that the Expenditure Committee asked the House to authorise the broadcasting of the Committee's public proceedings.
I would not wish to lay much stress on that. The Committee was aware at the time that it put this forward that it did so simply to get the subject aired. Technically, if such a resolution were passed by the House, it would have no effect whatever because the Committee does not have any public proceedings. With the exception of our discussion with the Lord President the Committee hardly ever


interviews witnesses. It leaves that to its sub-committees and it deliberates in private.
In consequence the number of public meetings of the Expenditure Committee is practically nil. It would have to be the proceedings of the sub-committees that would be broadcast. We sought to raise the principle. Much as I am in favour of that principle I feel that we must consider the implications and the difficulties. There are no difficulties of substance with radio broadcasting with one exception. It is not possible to do it in the way recommended by the Select Committee which considered broadcasting the proceedings of the House—that is, by producing a feed from the House from which the broadcasting authorities could select what they wanted. That is because Committees are discontinuous bodies.
it might be that to provide enough work for the unit preparing the feed we would literally have to distribute the Select Committees of the House in such a way that one met on Monday, another on Tuesday and so on. Otherwise we would have the extraordinary situation of the personnel producing the feed trying to cover the meetings of two or three Select Committees at the same time on a Wednesday and having no work on a Monday or Tuesday.
There is, however, no significant problem with radio broadcasting. With televising the proceedings there comes the problem of the excessive heat generated by the lights required for colour television. Technologically it is possible to produce cameras which do not require excessive light, but no one is doing that development work because there is no motivation for it. Until the House decides that it wants this work done, it will never get done.
There is much to be said for us agreeing to radio broadcasting and then developing the necessary camera for televison work. I do not think that hon. Members would want to sit for hours in the heat and light required for present-day colour television. We would certainly need to spend a considerable amount of money upon air-conditioning in the appropriate Committee Room otherwise hon. Members would be collapsing in the heat.
Nevertheless, I agree with previous speakers who have said that there is no earthly reason why, even if the House does not want its proceedings broadcast, its Committees should not be broadcast. The obvious example is the United States. Many people do not realise that the Senate has consistently rejected television and radio broadcasting of its proceedings but has said, "It is nothing to do with us if our committees want to be broadcast." It has said that although it does not wish its proceedings as a chamber to be broadcast, it is willing to leave it to its committees to decide whether they will permit broadcasting. Sometimes they do not permit it, for the reasons mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton-on-Tees. They feel that it would be better not to do so. Sometimes the committees are simply not newsworthy. It is only in certain cases that broadcasting is permitted by the individual committee.
There is no reason why the House should not be as tolerant as the Senate and say that it does not want its proceedings broadcast—which is what it says at the moment—but that it sees no reason why facilities should not be established to make it possible for the proceedings of the Committee to be broadcast.

Mr. Dell: The trouble is that the Expenditure Committee does not seem to have considered some of the difficulties before placing this motion before the House. My hon. Friend mentioned the United States Senate. Has he seen the proceedings of the Watergate Committee? Without commenting on the rights and wrongs of the situation, does he not think, with his high standards, that the Watergate Committee is conducting its proceedings in an adversary atmosphere and without due regard to the rights of witnesses? Would it not be necessary for the Expenditure Committee, in making this sort of suggestion, seriously to consider that point? There is a difference between the proceedings of the House and those of a Select Committee. A Select Committee hears evidence from persons who are not Members of this House.

Mr. English: My right hon. Friend has a point. I accept that it should be considered. I was trying to explain that the Committee was considering the principle and not detailed problems. I accept that


the proceedings of a Committee taking evidence are quite different from proceedings in the House or elsewhere. I see no reason why court proceedings should not be broadcast, as they are in the United States, but if a Committee were inquiring into matters of a possibly criminal nature there is plainly a difference between that and the sort of thing we are normally doing in the Expenditure Committee. Incidentally I have seen portions of the Watergate Committee hearings.
In the Expenditure Committee we are normally inquiring into policy alternatives. There is no shame in a man coming along and saying "I believe in X although someone else believes in Y". That is something the average witness is prepared to do in public, and does.
I should like the hon. Member for Nottingham, South to consider that as a member of the Expenditure Committee I find that the parliamentary Press does not cover its proceedings. He says that broadcasting a Committee's proceedings would give it the same facilities as the Press has. Unfortunately the Press does not have in Parliament the facilities which it has in relation to Departments of State. One of the things this House needs is a series of information officers such as Departments of State have. The Department of the Environment has an information section comprising 160 persons.
This House has none. It is not possible for the Press to cover every Committee. It might be possible for the Press to cover a particular Committee if it were known that that Committee was where the news was, but the parliamentary Press is limited in number and has no facilities for finding out which are the newsworthy Committees, so the parliamentary Press simply does not go to any Committees.
Sometimes the Press Association covers Committees, but Select Committees meet at the busiest time in the afternoon and often no representative of the parliamentary Press is present at all. Occasionally the economics correspondents of newspapers will attend meetings of the General Sub-Committee, and as a result they often write articles. I imagine that diplomatic correspondents might come to the Foreign Affairs and Defence Sub-Committee if it were discussing something of relevance to them, but they have to be informed that such discussions are

taking place. That is done on an amateur basis by the House because it has not an information section as has a Department of State. More is involved than broadcasting procedures. The House needs to brush up its relations with the Press, not least with the foreign and Commonwealth Press who are treated almost as if they were lepers compared with our home Press.
I do not want to go into questions of staff, which have been discussed ably by my colleagues, but the work that my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne said was not being done by the Expenditure Committee will never be done unless it has an adequate staff. For the final audit of the same Government expenditure the Comptroller and Auditor-General, as an Officer of Parliament, has a staff approaching 500. The Ombudsman who investigates complaints has a staff of about 90. The staff of the Expenditure Committee consists of one Clerk per sub-committee, one specialist adviser per sub-committee, and that is it.
That is not good enough. Sooner or later the Lord President will have to consider whether he wants an effective Expenditure Committee. We have long suspected that Governments do not want an effective Expenditure Committee. To be effective it needs a staff that could look at each item of the Public Expenditure White Paper and say, "The average increase this year is 10 per cent. but that item has gone up by 25 per cent ; why is that?" That is what is needed if the committees are to work as was originally intended. Without such a staff that cannot be done and that is why it has not been done. In my view it should be done, but it would need a substantial increase in the staff of the committee.

8.3 p.m.

Dame Irene Ward: To me, as a member of both the Procedure Committee and the Expenditure Committee, this has been an interesting debate. It is difficult to take one's mind back to the time when the Procedure Committee discussed the setting up of the Expenditure Committee, but I wonder whether at that time we asked the Government for an undertaking that time would be available in the House to discuss and carry out all the obligations which the Expenditure Committee was intended to carry out.
My guess is that, although members of the Expenditure Committee, who do a great deal of work—and could do a great deal more—are interested in it, the whole House is not necessarily so interested in it. I think I am right in saying that we never had a decision from the Government that there would be sufficient parliamentary time to discuss the work of the Expenditure Committee as it should be discussed.
To give one example, I was present during the discussions in the Expenditure Committee on whether each sub-committee should be allowed to report direct to the House. I can see the advantage of that to those hon. Members who are working on the committees, but on the other hand, having been in the House of Commons for much of my life, I know that many reports have emerged from various committees which, sometimes regrettably, have never been discussed in the House. If every sub-committee of the Expenditure Committee reported direct to the House, what chance would there be of all those reports—even the most brilliant of them—being discussed on the Floor of the House? Who would decide which reports should be discussed in the House? Although that is an attractive procedure, it is not practicable. Will the Leader of the House say how much time these reports would be allowed to occupy on the Floor of the House?
If we had many debates on the reports of sub-committees hon. Members on both sides of the House would be getting up in a fury and asking why all those reports should occupy the time of the House when other matters of greater interest and political necessity should be debated. There would be rows in the House, and we should achieve nothing.
The Lord President might say that we are having this debate today yet very few hon. Members have taken the trouble to attend. The next thing would be for the Press to ask why we go on debating these matters when the House of Commons as a whole is not interested. If the Lord President said that there was to be a debate on whether taxpayers' money should be spent on putting up more schools or more houses, that might create an interest and controversy, but that is not a practicable proposition. As a member many years ago of a sub-committee dealing with education Estimates, with

other members I investigated a large number of bad schools in England, Wales and Scotland and the sub-committee made a most interesting report. That report was never discussed in the House and no action was ever taken on it, which is a great pity.
We must decide whether to disband the Expenditure Committee and return to the Estimates Committee, as some hon. Members favour, but if the Government have a crowded legislative programme in any Session I cannot see any Lord President allocating many parliamentary days either for discussion of reports by sub-committees reporting direct to the House or of the report of the Expenditure Committee which carries out the obligations outlined by the Procedure Committee.
Although I feel that the Expenditure Committee could do a great deal more which could be of value because of all the trouble everybody takes over its activities—and I have found that even when great efforts are made by back benchers it takes nearly ten years to win any battle against the executive—I cannot see how we can make the Expenditure Committee's reports more effective or even provide for a proper discussion of its reports.
I am sorry that I feel this way, because I strongly believe that the Select Committees could have done their work even more effectively. However, I do not see any Lord President agreeing to have a great many debates on Expenditure Committee reports in each parliamentary Session. Therefore, we must make up our minds whether it would be better to return to the Estimates Committee set-up, even though we were able to have fewer discussions on those reports, or whether we want to go on, as we are now, hoping for genuine and unanimous Expenditure Committee reports. Unless Expenditure Committee Members are present to take part in debates in the House on their reports, I do not see how we can exercise very much pressure on the Lord President to give us more time for discussion.
It is a little disappointing that we have reached this situation. However, since we have been called upon to discuss these reports today, the first day after the Christmas Recess, apart from the emergency recall last week, I cannot help wondering whether this has been done


deliberately to give the Lord President an opportunity to say, "You have made all sorts of suggestions—those of you who have come to the House to take part in the debate—but you do not seem to have much support either from your own Committee or from the House as a whole". However, if we lay down that each subcommittee must report direct to the House, that in turn would put us in a ridiculous position. I enjoy being a member of the Expenditure Committee, and I am only sorry that it has not operated more effectively and efficiently.

8.13 p.m.

Dr. David Owen: The democratic process represented through the parliamentary system has traditionally focused on the control of expenditure. It is worth looking at what we are discussing.
Government spending, central and local, now amounts to 40 per cent. of total national output. The proportion of Supply expenditure in terms of gross national product was 4 per cent. in 1870, 6 per cent. in 1910, 12 per cent. in 1930, 22 per cent. in 1960 and 27 per cent. in 1972. Although we have exercised our so-called control by the democratic process, over the century it must be observed that, give or take a few alterations, the situation has remained remarkably unchanged. This is the central problem which we should be discussing. As Government involvement in expenditure has become ever greater, I believe that Parliament's involvement in the control of that expenditure has been progressively reduced.
I have been struck by the feeling of complacency in this debate—the attitude that all is well with the way in which Parliament exercises its democratic control. I do not share that complacency. When I entered the House my frustrations were the obvious ones that flow from youth and impetuousness. I was told that after a few years I would forget these frustrations. However, I must confess that I now feel even more impatient with the processes of Parliament.
This Parliament, which spends a great deal of time discussing reform of industrial relations, reform of local government and reform of the constitution, does absolutely nothing substantial to reform the House of Commons. This is the great dilemma.

Therefore, we must look at the question of what is Government and what is Parliament.
Constitutional historians make great play of the fact that in the United States there is a separation of powers between the executive and the legislature and that in the British Parliament there is a fusion of powers. From that statement people conclude that, because there is a fusion of powers, there is also to some extent a sharing of powers between the Government and Parliament. I believe that this power-sharing is a façade. What little sharing there once was has been eroded by a combination of powerful government and equally powerful party machines. I believe that we shall never regain any control over the executive until we are prepared to challenge the growth of government and party machines and assert the independence of Members of Parliament. The Select Committee procedure, and potentially the Expenditure Committee machinery, could be a vehicle for the exercise of independence by Members of Parliament in forming a judgment across a fairly wide range of Government decision-making, and this is where I see the most hopeful line of reform.
The first myth that needs to be examined is that a multitude of decisions are made by the Government under the authority of Ministers. Many of these are decisions which Ministers never see and in which they never have any involvement. When we talk of ministerial responsibility, we are increasingly talking about decisions made almost without the knowledge of Ministers. It is in this area, more perhaps than in major policy decisions which come to the Cabinet, that government is completely unchecked by any form of democratic process. This is the area that comprises the most fertile territory for Members of Parliament to exercise some control ; it is a most important area for parliamentary activity.
When I have not been in government I have always, either as an Opposition or Government back bencher, been a member of a Select Committee. I served on the first Select Committee on Science and Technology. Looking back over a period of eight years, I cannot imagine what it is like to be a Member of Parliament who is not also a member of a Select Committee. I often wonder what other non-Select Committee Members must do.


Service on a committee takes a great deal of my time, but I spend some of my most worthwhile hours sitting in Select Committees. I do not think that I have devoted enough time to it, and if I had more effective assistance I feel that my work in the Select Committees would have been more effective. I have gained a great deal of knowledge from Select Committee activities. Over the years my colleagues and I have looked into Britain's nuclear power programme, defence matters and other important subjects. This has been educative for me and has helped to close the knowledge gap.
The knowledge gap can be a serious problem between back-bench Members and the Government. This knowledge gap allows Oppositions to adopt ridiculous postures which they have to undo when they find themselves in government. It is the weakness of the system that causes Opposition to do entirely different things when in government. The public tend to judge Parliament in terms of the contradictions that flow from this situation. They do not understand why Opposition act differently when in government. This is true in defence and in many other matters. When in opposition it is difficult to hold back-bench Members of Parliament to sensible policies with all the limitations that exist in a complex, interdependent world.
It is much easier to sloganise our way through difficult and complex policies, to trivialise issues and to make them appear simple. It is that which is undermining democracy. We shall restore people's faith in democracy only when they see the real Parliament and if we bring to the forefront of parliamentary activity the work which goes on upstairs in Select Committees where Members of Parliament discuss serious issues. We need not be ashamed of the fact that it is often difficult to discover the parties to which various Members belong because we all know that, of the complex decisions we make, a large number are questions of balance and judgment made by individuals, whether they be Ministers or Members of Parliament.
If we look at how we can make the Expenditure Committee effective, we come rapidly to the conclusion that it will be effective only if it is seen to have powers. One of those powers stems from its unanimity, and we should not scoff at

that. The fact that a report has been endorsed by hon. Members on both sides of the House is an important aspect of the Committee's influence.
Then we have to decide how we can reinforce that power, that unanimity and that influence. First, the general public have to know more about our activities. More important, at times the Government have to fear Committees of this kind. Until we use the power of the vote on the Floor of the House to reinforce Committee decisions, I do not believe that we shall effectively regain respect and power from Government Departments.
We need a situation in which a Minister says to his Department "If we go down this path and the Expenditure Committee has come down against it, I am not sure that I can get it through on the Floor of the House." It is as naked as that. Of course, I do not advocate that the Expenditure Committee should vote against the Government day in and day out. It should be a rare event occurring perhaps five or six times a year. But that is what must occur if we are to regain and assert our authority and influence.
It is an essential part of British entry into the Common Market that the executive should be subjected in this House to far more criticism and should be capable of losing a vote, if necessary on a bi-party basis, having compromised late into the night at Brussels, and having to come back to this House and, if necessary to go back to Brussels again. That was an aspect of democracy mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, East (Mr. Cross-man) in his Godkin lectures in 1969. At the time he was Secretary of State for Health and Social Security, but he spoke with considerable experience as a former Leader of the House who had set up a number of Select Committees, and he envisaged this separation taking place. I do not think we should fear that. If we wish to restore authority and respect for this House, we shall have to adopt this kind of separation.
This is a major reform and it will take time. We have to consider how we can do it in the short term. The Expenditure Committee has not been a success. It lacks cohesion. Essentially


it needs a central core, the General Sub-Committee, or something emerging between the PAC and the Expenditure Committee which I am inclined to favour—to monitor expenditure across the board, both prospective and retrospective. It needs to be staffed effectively.
There are problems in allowing the PAC to go into government and to look not only at retrospective decisions, as it does at the moment, but also at the same time to have a mandate to look forward at policy decisions actively being discussed in the Ministries. The Civil Service and the Government machine would find it very difficult to adjust to the rôle of PAC investigators looking forward as well as backwards. But it is inevitable and it has to come. However, there are difficulties for the Government machine when one starts looking forward into policy. My right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Dell) has already moved the PAC significantly into policy, as was inevitable. Apart from anything else, hon. Members want to be involved in policy. That is why they come here. They are not auditors or tax specialists. Looking purely backwards is not enough for them. That rôle will have to be performed, of course, but it lends itself to being performed by officials buttressed by Members of Parliament exercising their judgment. But clearly the Expenditure Committee needs some central monitoring rôle.
As for its sub-committees, inevitably if they are small they will not perform that monitoring rôle effectively. They should do, but, having tried desperately to see the Defence Sub-Committee monitor the complex expenditure with which it is involved, I am forced to the conclusion that it is essential to become involved in detailed policy decisions. However, it has not been a total failure. In one small way the capability of the Defence Sub-Committee to look at our nuclear weapons programme in the 1980s was a significant expansion of democratic control inconceivable even five years ago. It discussed complicated issues of policy and the expenditure implications. It brought them together in a unanimous report producing a solution which many Ministers and senior civil servants did not like since it did not reinforce all their beliefs and also the sub-committee sought

the advice of outside experts, predominantly in the United States. The total exercise was a significant advance in democratic control.
The sub-committee would be helped greatly if it had more staff. At present it has two people on secondment from the PAC. I believe that that is the way it will have to go if it is to move forward. The practice of having people who already have worked in Government Departments and who have seen through their PAC rôle how the Government machine works is already showing benefits, providing that they continue to divorce themselves from their past PAC rôle and use their experience.
It may be that initially we shall always have to insist that the staff make a distinction between their PAC retrospective investigatory rôle and their coming on to a policy committee. They can no longer expect the same access to departmental information. They can no longer expect to operate on that information and on the valuable material obtained from outside. One of their essential rôles is to challenge Government views and to bring in a wider range of people. For example, there is a need for various pressure groups in the country to think of the Expenditure Sub-Committees as bodies to which they can make representations.
It is high time that Parliament was seen as a focus for representation from pressure groups. We should cease the endless creation of Royal Commissions or interdepartmental committees—a succession of ad hoc bodies answerable to no one, usually as an excuse for delay—when the Government and Parliament have available on their own doorstep an excellent investigatory machine that can make reports more quickly and represent the views of the democratically-elected Members culling in the experts and their knowledge. This is how Parliament will regain its power and control.
We are believed to be now arguing about what is democracy. We will no doubt go through a period of four weeks in which all the major issues of a democracy are sloganised and trivialised. I doubt whether the British parliamentary or democratic system will be strengthened in the next four weeks if, as we are led to believe, there is to be a General Election. Indeed, I suggest that it will be


looked upon as irresponsible and damaging to Parliament.
Be that as it may, this House is deluding itself if it does not face the fact that outside there is considerable concern about the way we conduct our business. Most of us recognise this situation. If we want to get something across, we try to arrange to speak on television or to write an article in one of the national newspapers. Very few hon. Members believe that any serious note will be taken of this kind of debate. One has only co look at the Press Gallery. Those great protectors of democracy are not interested in the serious discussion that goes on in this House. They do not write about it. They could not care less. They will pontificate in their editorials, but they will not bother to listen to a debate like this.
One problem is that, when Members of Parliament do hard work on an all-party basis and produce detailed unanimous recommendations, they see not only Parliament but the Press taking precious little notice of them. Some of the fault is ours. We should seriously consider allowing television into Select Committee proceedings. I have often wondered why we do not broadcast debates on radio by linking up the microphones in the House. It could be a first step towards the eventual televising of proceedings.
We would be making a great mistake if we did not accept that all is not well. We should start with expenditure, because that is the only effective way to have any democratic safeguards. This is the way that we shall be able to vote against the executive and control the growing machine of government. Let us be under no illusion. It means that those who expect to be in government must say in government the same as they said in opposition. That means being prepared to give power to the Opposition across the Floor of the House to criticise the Government. It is difficult for Governments to do this. Procedure in this House is controlled not by the House but by the Government. We all know that to be a fact of life.
Very few Leaders of the House have seen their rôle as protecting the House. They talk about it, but they are primarily servants of the Government. They serve in the Cabinet and have rarely been prepared to fight for the rights of this House. One party will have to take office with,

as a major part of what they as the Government will do, the reform of this House in a way which will make life uncomfortable for them. That is asking a lot of politicians. It is easy to be in favour of Select Committees when in opposition, but it is much harder to be in favour of them when in government. To some extent the present Government have moved quite a long way in that direction and deserve some credit for it. The amount of information that the Defence Committee has been given has been a breakthrough. But it is not enough and it is not public enough, because it is given only to the eight members of the Committee.
We are building very slowly. It is not adequate to continue in an ad hoc way. We must move towards a definite decision to separate some of the powers of Parliament from the executive. I do not suggest that we should go the whole way, as in the American system, because there are many powers that I wish to have retained by the executive. But that is the way that the decision should be made. From that, many other things would logically follow. I hope that the next Government will put reforms of that kind high on their list of priorities, because time will not be on their side.

8.35 p.m.

Mr. George Cunningham: I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Dr. David Owen) will allow me to say that his speech was packed with common sense which only in the British House of Commons would be regarded as revolutionary. In most places it would be regarded just as common sense, and what he said would have been brought into effect long ago. In this place it is unusual to have so many obvious truths stated so clearly.
I disagree with what my hon. Friend said about prescriptions, for reasons to which I shall come later, but I am sure he is right in saying that we need to move to a situation in which it is far more common, both upstairs and on the Floor of the House, for Members to vote against their own side without that being regarded as a reflection upon them—in fact, just the opposite.
My hon. Friend suggested that the reform of the House would have to be


carried out by a disinterested Government. My hon. Friend is being unrealistic, because I do not think that there will ever be a Government, this side of paradise, who will be prepared to limit their freedom by increasing the powers of other Members of the House ; but the Government represent approximately only 100 votes out of 630, and if other Members of the House, those on the Opposition and on the Government side wish to do so they can change the House, whether the Lord President likes it or not, and that is a situation that we should encourage.
In accordance with that feeling I apologise to the Lord President of the Council for having to fix my beady eye upon him in making my remarks. I should much prefer to address other Members, but the trouble is there are no others present.
In a slightly less imperfect situation I should be addressing my remarks to the Chairman of the Procedure Committee, and I say that in no criticism of the Father of the House who is the Chairman of that Committee. It is the habit of the House that a debate such as this takes place without the Chairman of the Procedure Committee having any rôle to play. No self-respecting legislature would for an instant support that situation.
If this House of Commons were competent in running its own affairs the matters we are discussing tonight would have gone to the Procedure Committee and the House would have had a report from that Committee on what it thought of these matters before itself discussing them.
With that apology to the Leader of the House I shall continue to fix my beady eye upon him.
The right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Grimond) wondered how we could change the situation in which important debates such as this are thought to be important by only a handful of Members and by hardly anyone else except a few cognoscenti amongst the academics outside the House. This is one issue on which I have changed my mind since being elected to Parliament.
When I came here, I felt that change could be brought about by an initiative inside the House only. Clearly, any change will have to be implemented by Members of Parliament, but if one

is realistic one realises that the initiative will have to come from outside the House ; or at least it will have to be a joint operation by interested Members and an outside campaigning body. I am thinking of something that would do for parliamentary affairs what Chatham House does for foreign affairs. It would be somebody between the academics and Government Departments in its approach. It would be extremely practical. It would see its function as that of campaigning to expose and ridicule this place till it gave up its manifestly bad ways in favour of more competent and democratic processes.
I wanted to say that in the presence of the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland, because he is not unconnected with about the only source of funds which might conceivably finance such an organisation—I do not refer to the Liberal Party—and which is not limited to providing funds for charitable purposes, because the improvement of the House of Commons could hardly be regarded as that.
It is right, after three years of operation of the Expenditure Committee and the way it had discharged its rôle, that it should be subjected to review. I agree entirely with those of my colleagues who have said that to all intents and purposes the Expenditure Committee is simply the old Estimates Committee with a change of title. It has produced the same kind of reports in the same kind of way and has done no additional work which the old Estimates Committee could not have done.
From my own experience of the Committee, I can think of only one respect in which there has been an improvement. Because we have continuing sub-committees covering individual areas of policy it is possible for a sub-committee, if it wishes, to pick up again a subject on which it has previously reported. One of the most useful operations of the subcommittee on which I serve, that covering the environment and the Home Office, was to call again before us witnesses from the Home Office on the matter of probation about a year after we had produced a report on that subject and to see what had been done about it. To our surprise we found that a number of things had been done. If that practice were more common, reports would not


tend to be put on a shelf in Whitehall and nothing more done.
First, the Expenditure Committee is only the old Estimates Committee with a different title. Secondly, it is not a Committee but a panel too large to be an effective Committee and only as large as it is because we need to draw from it enough people to form six subcommittees. Thirdly, if it is a Committee, it is certainly not an Expenditure Committee because the one thing which it hardly does anything about is public expenditure.
It is intriguing that tomorrow the House will vote on account £6,724 million, and on another Vote £883 million. Let us call that £½ billion. No Committee of this House has looked at those proposals ; no Committee has looked at the detail which is provided to back up that total sum. No one suggests that any Committee ought to look at the detail behind those proposals. We do not look at the Estimates before the Expenditure Committee and we do not, though we should, look at the Public Expenditure White Paper. It is debated on the Floor of the House and no more than noted, but in the Expenditure Committee and in the sub-committees the White Paper is not examined. It may be by choice of the sub-committees that they do not examine it, but the fact remains that they do not. I see the Chairman of the Committee indicating dissent. I take it that his point is that the General Sub-Committee has looked at the White Paper and at the priorities implicit in it. My point is that the subcommittees concerned with individual areas of policy over the last three years have not gone into the three White Papers which have been available to be investigated, with the exception of the operations of the General Sub-Committee on relationships between different programmes. The Public Expenditure White Paper has been as neglected by the Expenditure Committee and subcommittees as have been the Estimates, by which Parliament formally authorises funds.

Sir H. d'Avigdor-Goldsmid: I do not want to accuse the hon. Gentleman of unfairness, because he is a diligent attender at our Committee, but exactly what the hon. Member for Ashton-under-

Lyne (Mr. Sheldon) and his Committee do is examine the Public Expenditure White Paper and report on it as promptly as they can with the help of professional advisers. I cannot see how any Committee or sub-committee of the House can do more than what the hon. Member and his sub-committee do. I am not clear whether the hon. Member excludes or includes them in his strictures.

Mr. Cunningham: I am grateful for that intervention. To be more accurate, I should exclude the General Sub-Committee because it has done its job on the White Paper. I was thinking of the subject sub-committees, which cover all but one of the total. It is true of all of them that the investigation of the White Paper has not been what was envisaged for them by the Procedure Committee. The task of the Expenditure Committee has been the same as the task of the Estimates Committee—to pick a subject, produce a report on it and go on to another subject.
The fact that that has been done by a Committee called the Expenditure Committee has been relevant only to the extent that hon. Members felt that there needed to be some expenditure relevance of the subject which they chose before they felt free to adopt it. For example, my sub-committee, although covering Home Office matters, would feel precluded from adopting a legal subject which did not have financial implications. Subject only to that, we pick subjects of policy and deal with them in succession without having regard to the expenditure implications.

Mr. Joel Barnett: The point is that, while the General Sub-Committee has done the job referred to by my hon. Friend and by the hon. Member for Walsall, South (Sir H. d'Avigdor-Goldsmid), it has done a particular job on the total of public expenditure. What it has not done, and presumably what it has not the capacity to do because of the time available, is to make a comparison between different items of expenditure in the White Paper. For that purpose another sub-committee or an expansion of the General Sub-Committee may be required.

Mr. Cunningham: I agree. I shall leave until later what I think should be the


natural and common sense solution to the problem.
Perhaps I can illustrate the carelessness with which the House approaches the business of sub-committees by referring to the question of overseas aid. The House has two sub-committees which theoretically have to do with overseas aid—the Defence and Foreign Affairs Sub-Committee of the Expenditure Committee, which could examine the aid estimates and aid content of the White Paper if it so wished, and the Select Committee on Overseas Development. Although on this subject we have not one but two committees—

Mr. Dell: Three. My hon. Friend forgets the Public Accounts Committee.

Mr. Cunningham: I apologise. I omitted to refer to it perhaps because when the Public Accounts Committee intervened some while ago I thought that its conclusions were ill conceived.
In any event, we have two or three Committees which could oversee and scrutinise expenditure on overseas aid, but not one of them this year has considered or will consider the Government's proposals for expenditure on overseas aid. That causes no surprise to any hon. Member. That is how the House has always proceeded. But if one were to say that was the position to a member of any other legislature which I know, he would not believe it. For instance, when the French Government make expenditure proposals, those proposals are referred not to one but to several commissions of the French National Assembly. The same happens in Germany. It is odd that when seeking means by which the legislature could better control the executive we must look to Bonn or Paris rather than to Westminster.
If we were starting from scratch and thinking of the manner in which a sensible legislature should supervise and scrutinise the executive, we would surely conclude that there are three executive activities which need to be scrutinised—expenditure, legislation and general administrative action. If we were trying to devise a structure of Committees to scrutinise the executive, would we not wish the same one to take an interest in those activities which bore on expenditure, those to do with legislation and

those which were mere administration, rather than to seek different Committees dealing with different aspects of Government activity?
I would therefore believe that what we need are subject Committees, each adopting either one Government Department or a prescribed area of policy. They would be separate Select Committees reporting direct to the House, dealing with expenditure and with administration but not taking over the rôle of the Standing Committees on legislation. There would need to be one Committee which fulfilled the rôle of my hon. Friend's Sub-Committee on Public Expenditure generally. That would take away the need for the Expenditure Committee as we have it now.
Such subject Committees would need to be rather larger than the present subcommittees. They would have 12 to 15 members and that would be a positive advantage of separate Committees. As long as they are sub-committees, there is a limit to their size, because there is a limit—let us say 50—beyond which an Expenditure Committee would be foolish. So there is a limit of about eight or nine on the number of members in a subcommittee. The natural number for a subject committee would be larger.
My hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Dr. David Owen) mentioned the EEC. If we had subject Committees, one of their functions would be to take as much interest in activities in Brussels and Strasbourg as in London. It would be natural for such Committees to supply some of the personnel for subject operations in Strasbourg as well as here.
One could argue for some time the case for subject Committees. It is so manifest that to go on at length only suggests that it is less obvious than it seems. I am sure that they will come. It is only a question of how much we resist them and how reluctant the House is to make the changes required.
The objections are easily dismissed. It is suggested that hon. Members should not become accountants—

Mr. Joel Barnett: Oh.

Mr. Cunningham: I understand that some already are.
If that argument were to hold the day, we need never have set up a Public Accounts Committee in the first place. We may be absolutely sure that, if Gladstone had not done it, no one would do it today because it would be too revolutionary.
It is also said that hon. Members should not become experts, that there is no need for them to be expert. It is part of the English disease to believe that a man is positively less competent to be a Minister if he is slightly expert in the subject with which he may be dealing. We have to get rid of that assumption.
We have virtually no control over the executive by the legislature at present. We must move in the direction of having more control. That means that hon. Members must be prepared to do their job in two different forums—in the Chamber, certainly, but also to an increasing extent in Committee. The hon. Member for Tynemouth (Dame Irene Ward) seemed to suggest that the affairs of the Committees would achieve nothing unless they were debated on the Floor of the House. But many things are debated on the Floor of the House in relation to which nothing happens on the part of the Government even then. Action by the Government can be brought about as a result of Committee activities which never come to the Floor of the House. That is what happens in many other legislatures and we must get accustomed to that direct dealing between Committees of the House and the Government, without the Floor of the House necessarily being involved.
The matter of staff is touched on in these reports. I do not share the view that hon. Members will become effective only when they have one or half-a-dozen research assistants. That is not the first step to take. The first step is for hon. Members to take some really lousy decisions. If they had taken bad decisions, we should be flooded with assistance in order to stop us doing anything so silly again. The first thing is for Members to decide that they are taking the decisions, and to take them. Then the administration required to ensure that those are good decisions will follow.
When it comes to the present staff of a Committee such as the Expenditure Committee, once again it is useful for the House to compare its ways with those of other legislatures. A few months ago I asked an American Congressman how many staff there were in Congress for giving procedural advice. We all know that the Americans have vast staffs for subject advice, but for giving procedural advice, the Congressman said, "I cannot remember the precise number, but it is the responsibility of the Parliamentarian." I think that that is what he called him. When I asked how many staff the Parliamentarian had—the Parliamentarian is the equivalent of our Clerk of the House—the answer was five or six, or something like that.
This House suffers from having too many Clerks who are far too intelligent for the job that needs to be done. The result is that the procedural decisions which should rest with Members are taken by the Clerks because the whole business has been erected into a mystery. There is no need for the mystery. If half of the rules got into the rule book instead of into that useless thing Erskine May, perhaps hon. Members would understand the rules and there would be no need for half a hundred Clerks to tell us what to do. At a time when we are having a change in this respect, I hope that the next Clerk of the House who produces another edition of Erskine May will have the thing wrapped around his neck, both being dropped into the river. We need more in the rules of order of the House and less in Erskine May.
Perhaps I have now condemned myself to complete futility in that no one will take seriously anything that I have said. But I conclude by referring to the matter of direct reporting from subcommittees and the way in which the Leader of the House has handled it or, rather, has not handled it. The Committee was absolutely clear on this matter. We said that we wanted direct reporting to take place. The Government's response, in Cmnd. 5187, was,
This would be a matter for the House to decide. In the Government's view, however, it is important for the Expenditure Committee to develop an effective co-ordinated approach


to the scrutiny of public expenditure ; and they believe that the recommended change would not be helpful in this respect
The Expenditure Committee as a whole cannot have a co-ordinated approach to anything. Forty-nine people simply cannot have such an approach ; there are too many of them. If the Committee has to have such an approach to public expenditure it must be limited to no more than 20 members. That rôle can be performed and is performed to a great extent by the General Sub-Committee of the Expenditure Committee. The rôle of the rest of the Expenditure Committee is to look into their subject areas, to reach conclusions within the limits of each area, and to leave it to my hon. Friend and his General Sub-Committee to look at the relationship between them.
Going on from the content of the Government reply, we argued the matter with the Lord President on 9th April. My hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, West quoted some of the Lord President's remarks and I should like to quote some of them. According to page 5 of the minutes he said, when pressed on the matter:
I do not think I would want to stand out against this
that is, direct reporting,
if the Committee felt very strongly that Sub-Committee Reports should come direct to the House.
At a later stage he said:
Certainly the House cannot decide it unless a Motion goes down. I personally have not been particularly keen on it ; but I must listen to what is said to me today and perhaps take the necessary action.
That was on 9th April 1973, but absolutely no action has been taken. He was to go away and think again.
I do not think it is reasonable for the Committee to place the whole blame on the Lord President. He should have done something in the intervening period, or at least have been in touch with the Committee and said that he stuck to his original view, or that he had amended it, or whatever, but if he did not, we should have chased him. But we all know that Committees are very much in the hands of the Lord President and that we cannot get anything on to the Floor of the House without his good will. I cannot remember whether it was unanimous, but it was certainly the majority view—

Dame Irene Ward: No, I did not vote for it.

Mr. Cunningham: It may not have been the view of the hon. Lady, but it was the majority view of the Committee that there should be direct reporting. For the Lord President to do nothing about the recommendation, after discussing it with us for nine months, is too bad.
I turn now to the need for reform of this place. The House is constantly producing reports about Whitehall Departments, their inefficiency and their follies, and how they should have thought of doing things in a better way before we told them how to do it. It would be nice some time to have Whitehall do a report on this place, because its inefficiencies and managerial incompetence are far greater than anything which the House has discovered in Whitehall. In the not-too-distant future, and hopefully with the assistance of some such outside body as I have mentioned, the public will take an interest not merely in what we say and do in this place but also in how we do it. If such a report were produced we would not come out of it with credit. We need to make these reforms as fast as we can, because they are long overdue.

9.5 p.m.

Mr. Edmund Dell: The House seems to be in a reforming mood this evening. That is probably because it is empty. I hope that it will not be considered odd that any hon. Member should sit through the debate on the Expenditure Committee and its reports. I have done so I suppose because it is a brother Committee to my own. Now I take this opportunity of intervening with some remarks which may be affected by the fact that I happen for the time being to be Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee. I intervene now because I understand that my hon. Friend the Member for Farnworth (Mr. Roper) may wish to contradict a great deal of what I say, and I therefore give him this opportunity.
I have the impression that some of the problems of the proposal on broadcasting have not been thought through. It is true that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, West (Mr. English) said, we do not often have Watergates in this country. Perhaps one of the reasons is that we do not have separation of powers, although I go a long way with what my


hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Dr. David Owen) said.
Nevertheless we do have in the proceedings of our Select Committees very tense situations between the Committees and witnesses. I have the impression, mainly through following in the newspapers, the proceedings of the Expenditure Committee that that Committee has very tough sub-committee chairmen, and that they often fall out with witnesses. One needs to think out what method of protection of witnesses there would be if the proceedings were televised. I think, for example, of the recent investigations of my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton on-Tees (Mr. William Rodgers) into the situation in South Africa. There were many occasions then when it would have been reasonable, if the proceedings were being televised, for a witness to have had at least some protection against the eagerness of the Committee. In developing our procedures we should not depart from fairness with witnesses. It is unnecessary. There are temptations under the gaze of the television camera.

Mr. William Rodgers: Did I understand my right hon. Friend to say that Committees are unfair now in their dealing with witnesses? If they are not unfair now, why should they be unfair if television cameras were there? If they are unfair now, will my right hon. Friend explain in what way?

Mr. Dell: I cannot judge particular instances that occur in Committees. I say that there is a danger. There is a danger of drawing outside witnesses, who are nothing to do with the House, who are not even civil servants, but people from outside, to give evidence under conditions to which they are totally unaccustomed, possibly in a hostile atmosphere. I am simply saying that that question must be settled before the new procedure is recommended to the House.
I take the opposite view to that evidently taken by my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Dr. Gilbert). I believe that it would be more acceptable to televise the proceedings of the House than the proceedings of a Select Committee. There are greater dangers in doing it the other way round. However, if my hon. Friends have an answer to the question when they have thought about the matter, which I do not believe they have

yet done, they should present it to the House.
I come to the very interesting speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton, with which I largely agreed. He mentioned the European Community and the effect our membership might have on the proceedings of the House. I have noticed, and I am sure the Government have noticed, that since we entered the European Community we have defeated the Government more times, not on major issues but on issues of some substance, than for a very long period, and on more occasions the Government have, unwillingly I suspect, accepted the will of the House. If some of my hon. Friends who take a different view of membership of the European Community from mine—there are not many here tonight, but there are some—are looking around for the benefits of our membership, perhaps there is here at any rate one benefit, that we are moving in the direction pointed by my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton.
My hon. Friend also said, and is obviously right, that there are taken in Departments many decisions of which Ministers are ignorant, for which they are in no real sense responsible, although they are responsible in a constitutional sense which is sometimes rather difficult to understand. I have come to the conclusion that in practice one of the major forms of responsibility within our constitutional system is that of the Accounting Officer to the Public Accounts Committee—the responsibility for all the decisions, many of which Ministers are not aware of.
There is an extraordinary situation in the Public Accounts Committee whenever there is a change of Government and some ex-Minister becomes the Committee's Chairman. He interviews his former civil servants on decisions for which he was constitutionally responsible and of which he probably was unaware, and even criticises the way those civil servants took those decisions. This is a large part of the substance of responsibility which exists within our constitutional system. The trouble is that the Public Accounts Committee does not have the capacity to deal with this problem as it should be dealt with. While hon. Members may be thinking of


how to improve the Expenditure Committee I am thinking of how to improve the Public Accounts Committee to shoulder better this important responsibility.
It was disappointing to note how many of my hon. Friends are dissatisfied with the way the Expenditure Committee has been operating. Perhaps I could follow the recent precedent of my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton-on-Tees and say "I told you so." He had an interesting letter in The Times yesterday in which he referred to the Government reorganisation and the break up of the DTI, and the implication was "I told you so." I was most sceptical about the Expenditure Committee and I said so in this House. I was sceptical for one reason which lies behind many of the doubts expressed today and which is that, in so far as the remit of the Expenditure Committee has been specific, it has not been performed, and that that part of the remit which has been performed has been the general part which enables sub-committees of the Expenditure Committee to discuss overall policies in general terms. That is an interesting exercise for individuals, and some of the reports which have been produced have been most interesting and of a high standard, but they seem almost unrelated to the job of controlling the executive.
The Expenditure Committee was set up to assist the House in controlling the executive. The Committee has written essays, many of them very good, which have gone to Government Departments and which no doubt have been marked there according to their quality—some alpha, some beta, and some further down the Greek alphabet. That is no way to control the executive. To do that it is necessary to take specific subjects, to give them to Select Committees and to let the committees get on with it.
I shall give some examples. The Public Accounts Committee has a certain reputation in the Civil Service and perhaps sometimes in this House and not only because it has a very large staff in the form of the Exchequer and Audit Department, although that is an important element. The other reason is that it is highly specific in the nature of its inquiries. It is always asking questions such as "Here is your policy. Why do

you think these methods will enable you to achieve this policy?" That is the very specific kind of question to which the Public Accounts Committee devotes itself.
This House has developed Select Committees over the last few years. We do not need more general Select Committees such as the Expenditure Committee or the Select Committee on Overseas Aid, but Select Committees dealing with specific subjects. I should like to see Select Committees on legislation. Legislation presents specific problems which the House is charged to consider and which it considers most ineffectively, but which it could consider far more effectively through the process of Select Committees.
I took the view at the time and I repeat it now that the establishment of the Expenditure Committee, with the exception of the General Sub-Committee of the Expenditure Committee, which has a specific remit, was a mistake. I suspected that the General Sub-Committee of the Expenditure Committee was at one time trying to turn itself into a Select Committee on economic affairs. That would have been unfortunate. Recently it has been devoting itself more to its real responsibilities. It has made a great success of presenting the House with information which would not otherwise have been available.
My hon. Friend the Member for Stockton-on-Tees remarked on the relations between the Public Accounts Committee and the Expenditure Committee. That is an important matter which is worthy of consideration. It is undoubtedly true that there has been duplication. There has been duplication in our investigation of Concorde, RB211 and various other projects. If such duplication could be avoided, so much the better. There is always the possibility that the one will entrench on the other. One possibility would be to consider unifying the two Committees, but in that there would be major problems.
We shall certainly have to consider whether there is a clear line of demarcation between the two Committees. One thing which must take place is liaison between the two Committees. I do not like the line of demarcation which has been suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton-on-Tees, namely, that the Expenditure Committee should deal with the development of policy and


should look prospectively forward, and that the Public Accounts Committee should look retrospectively at expenditure already incurred. We must be careful in imagining that the Public Accounts Committee is concerned only with matters retrospective. It is certainly retrospective facts which give rise to that Committee's investigations, but its investigations have definite forward implications—for example, the inquiry into North Sea oil.
There are difficulties about my hon. Friend's suggestion. One is that the Public Accounts Committee has responsibilities to this House. It has responsibilities to investigate the accounts. We cannot allow that responsibility to be put aside. There is not only expenditure but income.
There is a better possible division between the two Committees. The Public Accounts Committee should be responsible for investigating the economy and the administration with which policy is pursued, be it past, present or future. It should be responsible for putting to Government Departments, as it does now, the following question, "Why do you expect these means, this administration and this expenditure to achieve the objective which you say is your objective?"
The Public Accounts Committee, in doing that, would not question the Government's policy. It would accept that policy and consider the means and the administration. It would leave to the Expenditure Committee the area in which it has proved to be most interested—namely, the formation of policy and consideration of priorities among policies, a matter—priorities—which I confess I doubt whether Select Committees have the capacity to undertake. Nevertheless if the Expenditure Committee thinks that it can do so, all well and good. Information about the way in which priority decisions are made could certainly be within the scope of the Expenditure Committee. That would be a better division between the Public Accounts Committee and the Expenditure Committee.
Undoubtedly there is a problem, and it is one worth thinking about. Possibly this could be done by liaison between the two Committees. Or perhaps there

might be some other method which the Government might suggest.

9.19 p.m.

Mr. John Roper: I n spite of the earlier remarks of my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Dell), I find relatively little in what he had to say with which I must disagree. Like my right hon. Friend, I feel that in the development of the work of the Public Accounts Committee, which is now occurring under his chairmanship, and in the development of the work of the Expenditure Committee it is important that there is discussion and liaison to ensure that both Committees are as effective as possible.
I agree with what my right hon. Friend said about the importance of our membership of the European Economic Community and the work of the Committees. One of the arguments which many of my right hon. and hon. Friends have developed against membership of the EEC—it has been an effective argument and one with which I agree—is that it has given greater powers to the executive and that it has taken matters out of the control of this House and, for the time being, of the European Parliament. In this area Select Committees might have an important part to play.
I wish to speak briefly in assessing the first three years' work of the Expenditure Committee with reference to the special reports which we are considering. Three years ago, as a new Member of the House, I was fortunate to be allocated to the General Sub-Committee, which has escaped the criticisms which have been made of some of the other Committees. I am not sure that we deserve to escape all those criticisms because, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead said, we have at times preferred to consider the macro-economic effects of public expenditure rather than the balances between the various Departments, which is an essential function of our task.
In its first three years of existence the General Sub-Committee has shown the need for a Select Committee on Expenditure, and perhaps the reason why the other sub-committees have not developed as well as was initially hoped lies in the question of staff, to which I shall return.
The question has been raised whether we should have one Select Committee


on Expenditure or several subject Committees for different groups of Government Departments. Irrespective of the argument about direct reporting or the way in which we confirm sub-committee reports, my view is that there are probably advantages in keeping a general Expenditure Committee which has much more flexibility to tackle particular problems as they arise. I do not think that a pattern of subject Committees is necessarily the right one, nor do I think that the all-important links between the general monitoring of the expenditure programmes of the Government and the analyses carried out by the various subcommittees would work with a series of subject Committees. It would be a mistake to try to latch on to its structure things which the Expenditure Committee was never intended to do.
For example, my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton-on-Tees (Mr. William Rodgers) referred to the pre-legislative study of the material in the Companies BUI which should be done by a subcommittee, but that is not what a subcommittee of the Expenditure Committee should appropriately do. One might question whether a sub-committee of the Expenditure Committee is the right body to investigate British investment in South Africa. In the absence of a Select Committee for that purpose, I am glad that my hon. Friend's sub-committee could do it. I hope that the Lord President will bear in mind that we should not overload the Expenditure Committee and that we should ensure that it tackles its principal job rather than doing things which should be carried out by other parliamentary procedures.
As I was not in the House during the existence of the Estimates Committee, it is difficult for me to assess the relative merits of the Estimates Committee and the Expenditure Committees. Some of the sub-committees seem not to have changed their personnel or their mode of action greatly. I hope that with appropriate staff we shall be able to ensure that this will occur in future.
I was interested in the suggestion of my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, South-West (Mr. George Cunningham) that there is need for investigations into the operation of the House and its Select Committees and the activities of its Clerks. I wonder whether we should persuade the

Lord President to arrange for a Select Committee of permanent secretaries or perhaps for the Central Policy Review Staff to carry out a PAR analysis on the Houses of Parliament in the near future. It would make an interesting document for a Select Committee of this House subsequently to review.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead has raised some important questions en the effect of the investigatory activities of Select Committees in the event of their being televised. I readily accept that there are problems along the lines to which he referred. This is a matter which I hope the House and the Select Committee on Expenditure can consider further. I am sorry that tonight we are merely taking note of the recommendation and do not have an opportunity to vote upon it. Controlled experiments would be of value. We could then assess whether the problem to which my right hon. Friend referred was serious.
It seems unfortunate that, when the Opposition were prepared to provide a Supply Day for a debate on this subject, they did not ensure that there was the opportunity to vote on some of the Select Committee's recommendations. I can only blame that upon the usual channels.
I am glad that the hon. Member for Walsall, South (Sir H. d'Avigdor-Gold-smid) has returned to the Chamber because I want to refer to his remarks, as chairman of the Committee, about the question of staffing. We have the Second Special Report from the Expenditure Committee for the Session 1970–71 before us. That report was initiated before the hon. Gentleman became chairman of the Committee. His remarks did not follow the recommendations of paragraphs 30–32 of the report, and, indeed, that was not necessary. It was more than two years ago that the setting up of a unit to carry out the precise monitoring function referred to so much today was recommended.
There are four different types of staff which a Select Committee could have. First there are the specialist advisers for particular and specific inquiries. In some cases it may be that outside specialist advisers could continue operating over a number of inquiries. I add my tribute to those already paid to the work of Wynne Godley, Director of the Department of Applied Economics at Cambridge, who


has served the General Sub-Committee as an excellent specialist adviser since its inception. That is because he is a gamekeeper turned poacher, having been responsible while in the Treasury for a good deal of the work which resulted in the setting up of the public expenditure system. He was therefore peculiarly well-equipped to advise the General Sub-Committee and has done so excellently. Most of the other sub-committees considering particular areas of policy have inevitably changed their specialist adviser as they have gone along.
Secondly we have the Clerks of the House, who have provided excellent assistance. Inevitably and essentially they are non-specialist advisers. Thirdly, as my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Dr. David Owen) has mentioned, he has had the advantage, on the Defence and External Affairs Sub-Committee, of having two officers from the Department of the Comptroller and Auditor General seconded to the sub-committee to work with it. This is a most interesting experiment and I hope that my hon. Friend's sub-committee will in due course report to the House upon how this experiment has gone.
We should have a staff unit of our own along the lines laid down in a rather modest way initially in the Second Special Report of 1970–71. It recommended that there should be a small, full-time, properly-equipped secretariat comprising, say, a head of section and two subordinates. They would have the function of carrying out precise monitoring of public expenditure figures contained in the many documents which come from the Government to the Expenditure Committee and of ensuring that problems which should be considered are put before the various subcommittees. They would perform for the sub-committees of the Expenditure Committee the same rôle as the Comptroller and Auditor General and his staff carry out for the Public Accounts Committee in pinpointing problems which should be investigated in more detail.
I differ from the hon. Member for Walsall, South since I regard this as a different task from the job carried out by the specialist adviser who comes in to assist on a particular problem. The

rôle of the full-time staff would be to monitor the figures and to spot the things that should be investigated in more detail. It is only when the Expenditure Committee has such a staff carrying out a monitoring function that the development of its work can take place, as I believe was the intention in the Green Paper and in the discussions which took place in this House in 1970. Because we have not had this sort of staff at our disposal, we have not developed in the way which was hoped and, therefore, my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead can now truly say that he told us so in 1970.
Unless we have a staff such as I have outlined, I believe that the distinction between the Expenditure Committee and the old Estimates Committee will not be as clear as was intended and we shall fail to carry out the essential rôle of a Select Committee of the House in dealing with public expenditure, in controlling the activities of the executive and in ensuring that the House has appropriate reports and information on which to make decisions.

9.32 p.m.

The Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons (Mr. James Prior): This has been an interesting and very worthwhile debate. I shall not make the obvious remarks but merely say it is a pity that more hon. Members were not present to listen to the various contributions. The debate has ranged widely and has raised a great number of points which I shall try to cover in my speech.
The hon. Member for Stockton-on-Tees (Mr. William Rodgers) said he felt that, once Select Committee members got their teeth into an interesting subject, they enjoyed their work and felt that they were doing something worth while. I agree with the hon. Gentleman since I have had similar reports from hon. Members in all parts of the House to that effect. The hon. Gentleman said he thought that three years was too short a time in which to judge whether a Committee was likely to succeed. Whether or not the Expenditure Committee has been a success, I should like at the outset of my remarks to express my personal gratitude to my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall, South (Sir H.


d'Avigdor-Goldsmid) for all his work and also to all other hon. Members who have played their part in the work of the Select Committee and its sub-committees.
The right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Dell) asked whether the Expenditure Committee was doing its job of inquiring into expenditure. While he was speaking I took a quick glance at the three reports which the House discussed a little earlier. I noted that the Committee has been far more interested in the policy side than in the way money should be spent. I think there is a good deal in what the right hon. Gentleman said about the future division of responsibility between the Public Accounts Committee and the Expenditure Committee.
As I understood the right hon. Gentleman, he thought that the PAC should investigate the economy and the administration which governs the economy—

Mr. Dell: Policy.

Mr. Prior: —and that the Expenditure Committee should concern itself much more with policy, the formation of priorities and so on. This will be examined along with all the other suggestions which have been made.
At this point perhaps I might make another general remark. Many hon. Members in all parts of the House consider that a major reform of our procedures and of what might be called our institutions is necessary. The difficulty always is that there are a number of conservatives—with a small "c"—on both sides of the House who would resist any such reforms. It is always very much harder for a Government or even for an Opposition to move on this matter than the mass of hon. Members perhaps realise.
Whatever hon. Members have said about this Parliament drawing to its close, I make no comment. Indeed, I know nothing about it. It may be that before the end of this Parliament or in the next Parliament we shall want to make considerable changes in the way we conduct our affairs. I think that a Select Committee system rather more pointed and rather less diffuse than at the moment will have an important part to play.
We have got into the habit of a few enthusiasts thinking that it would be a

good idea if they could investigate something, with the result that suggestions come forward to set up a Select Committee to look at it. That is not a very satisfactory way of running our business. This again is a matter of which we shall need to take account in future.
The hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Dr. David Owen) said that parliamentary control had become less as its expenditure had become greater. In some ways that is true. Even m the time that I have been in the House the voting of Supply has changed. I have been in the House only since 1959 but, when I first came here, quite often on a Supply afternoon there were three or four speeches concerned with the actual granting of Supply before we got on to the Opposition motion for the afternoon. We have got completely away from that habit, and I do not think that the Expenditure Committee has yet taken its place.
I agree with the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton that, if Parliament is to be seen to be relevant to the public outside, it has to reform and has to be seen to be a worthwhile activity. I also agree with the hon. Gentleman that Parliament can be effective only if it has more power.
Having said that, I believe that the power and the rôle of the back bencher has increased in the past few years. It showed itself remarkably in the last year or two of the Labour administration, and there have been many occasions in this Parliament when back benchers have told the Government what they had to do if they wanted to get a majority. On many occasions I have found myself having to tell my colleagues that such and such a policy would not be acceptable to back benchers and, therefore, that it had to be modified.
I do not take the view that the rôle of the back benches is constantly diminishing. However, there is a growing frustration among back benchers about their ability to do their job properly when so many of them are either full-time or at least extremely energetic Members of Parliament.

Mr. English: The right hon. Gentleman means in the two major parties.

Mr. Prior: Not at this stage. I am trying to be as generous as I reasonably can be to all parties.
I turn now to the strictures by the hon. Member for Islington, South-West (Mr. George Cunningham) on the management not only of Parliament but of the Houses of Parliament. Without in any way overstepping the mark on to other people's responsibilities, I hope he will see Sir Edmund Compton and put his views to him because Sir Edmund's rôle in improving the administration of this place could be very important.
The hon. Gentleman accused me of saying to the Committee that I would again consider whether sub-committees should be allowed to report direct to the House and then take no further action. The House should know that I wrote to the chairman of the Committee and expressed the view that it was better for sub-committees to report through the full Expenditure Committee rather than direct as sub-committees. I think that some sub-committees have been more enthusiastic than others. Some have produced much better reports than others. We do not want sub-committees that are too large. I am not in favour of large subcommittees. A large sub-committee tends to be dominated by either the chairman or one or two hon. Members who always want to put their points of view, and the other Members of the Committee get bored and do not turn up. That is not a satisfactory position. Therefore, I do not support large sub-committees.

Mr. George Cunningham: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Prior: Yes, when I have concluded this point. The hon. Member for Stockton-on-Tees asked whether we required sub-committees. Would we be better placed if we had individual committees instead of sub-committees? That is a matter that we could consider, but there is something to be said for having a committee that welds the whole thing together and would do what the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton wants done—namely, to speak with real authority on behalf of the Expenditure Committee.

Mr. Cunningham: I want to press the right hon. Gentleman on the question of sub-committees. We know that he is opposed to sub-committees reporting direct to the House. The Government's reply made that clear and the right hon. Gentleman told us that when we examined

him before the full Committee. But he also acknowledged on that occasion that it was a matter for the House to decide. In practical terms, that means that a motion must be put down. Is he prepared to put down a motion containing that proposition so that the House can decide whether to accept his view or the view of the Expenditure Committee?

Mr. Prior: I am not by any means certain that it is the view of the Expenditure Committee as a whole. From discussions that I have had with hon. Members who are not on the Committee, I have found quite a bit of opposition to that course. Therefore, I have not thought it right to put down that particular motion. However, there was nothing to stop hon. Gentlemen putting down a motion today if they wished to do so.

Mr. Cunningham: The Expenditure Committee has made a special report to the House saying that it wishes to have direct reporting. How can the Leader of the House say that the Expenditure Committee thinks this or that? It is not for him to go behind a special report of the Committee to the House.

Mr. Prior: I have heard one member of the Expenditure Committee this afternoon say that he is not in favour of direct reporting by sub-committees. I am not saying that the Expenditure Committee did not want it, but I know of other hon. Members who have strongly objected to this course. Therefore, for that reason and because the Government have not so far approved of it, I have not put down that motion. There is no reason why the hon. Gentleman could not have put down such a motion. It could have been taken with today's business if that had been thought necessary.
I now come to the question of the time available for debates. We have given the usual three days. One was taken by the Public Accounts Committee early in the Session, one is being used today and generally a third day is made available. In addition, we are making one day available for a debate on the White Paper on Public Expenditure, and during the debate on the Budget, although one cannot guarantee that other subjects will not be raised by hon. Members, a day is being provided for a debate on public expenditure. Time is available for debates, and


it is a great shame that hon. Members other than members of the Committee and my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, South (Mr. Fowler) have not taken part in today's debate.
On the question of televising Committee proceedings. I made my view clear when I gave evidence to the Committee. The House had passed a resolution that proceedings should not be televised. I felt that no further action could be taken and that, as that view was likely to last for this Parliament, I saw no other opportunity of putting it to the House.
My own view—it is a personal view—is that the film concerning a Standing Committee by Grenada last summer, and some of the discussions which took place in the policy formation in the Department of Trade and Industry, which I think hon. Members will have seen, represent a process which we ought to consider carefully and, wherever possible, expand. It is a practice which I think could only enhance the reputation of Parliament and enable the public to have a better idea of what goes on in this building.
There are divided views on whether it is right that the Chamber should be televised or whether we should start with Committees. Again expressing a personal view, I think that it would be right to start with radio. That would be an easy way, and I have never understood why the House does not do the daily parliamentary report not as a report by an outsider but by using extracts from what hon. Members say. I think that we might discuss that further on a suitable occasion. I could not agree to any change in the decision not to televise the House until the House had had time to debate the matter again, and I doubt whether it will find time to do so this year.
The Government are anxious to do all they can to help the Committee by means of specialist assistance. At present, apart from typing and secretarial services, there are 16 supporting staff to the Committee, including four part-time specialist advisers. The Committee has a permanent adviser, who has already been mentioned, and I think the House will recognise that that is a marked increase in support in the last two years. I rather agree with the view that specialist assistance is probably best taken on for a

particular inquiry and not employed on a full-time basis, but the Government will continue to consider any request from the Committee for further specialist help to assist in its inquiries.
Therefore, I emphasise that the Government's concern is that the Expenditure Committee should be able to develop in a way which will provide a stronger, more effective and more co-ordinated instrument of parliamentary scrutiny. I am concerned to stress this co-ordination aspect because of the risk, as we see it, that the Committee may lower its sights and go along the more limited paths of the old Estimates Committee. If it did, much of the advantage of the change made in 1971 would be lost. However, I wish to study the remarks of the right hon. Member for Birkenhead.
The wide-ranging and detailed nature of the Committee's inquiries involves, as the House will appreciate, a considerable volume of work not only for members of the Committee but also for Ministers and Departments who are required to give oral and written evidence. This obligation was fully recognised when the Committee was established and I think that it is fair to say that, with the help of the Committee and its Clerk, generally good working contacts have been established with the Departments involved. I hope that that will continue to be so. Certainly the Government's intention will remain to do all they can to assist the Committee to fulfil its extremely important parliamentary rôle and I shall hope, after looking carefully at what has been said in the debate, to be able to improve matters as time passes.

Sir H. d'Avigdor-Goldsmid: My right hon. Friend has made no reply to my suggestion, with which I think all my colleagues agree, that the Committee should be appointed for a Parliament and not on a sessional basis.

Mr. Prior: I am sorry. That matter is dealt with at the start of my prepared speech.
The Committee is now set up under a Standing Order. My hon. Friend suggests that its members should be appointed for a whole Parliament. I do not know whether the House would think that that was too restrictive, but I see no major objection to it, and if it is hon.


Members' wish I will see that that happens. Generally, however, we reappoint the Committee for each Session and hon. Members who do not wish to serve on it can come off and others can go on. That is a practice which other Select Committees will probably want to follow. In that case, I hope that if we do what is suggested it will not be treated as a precedent.

Mr. W. F. Deedes: Not the least reason for doing what my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall, South (Sir H. d'Avigdor-Goldsmid) suggested is that it would save weeks of time in the work of the Select Committee at the beginning of each Session, because there is always an unaccountable delay between setting up the Committee and its getting down to work. It knocks a considerable proportion off the working Session. If my right hon. Friend applies his remarks more widely, he will find that it is welcomed by the chairmen and members of other Select Committees.

Mr. Prior: That is what I thought, and that is why I thought that I should qualify what I said. However, I will consider the comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Mr. Deedes). The Committee on Science and Technology has already put the point to me and I have promised to consider it further. We do not set up some Select Committees for each Session ; we set them up only for a period. It is reasonable that this suggestion should apply to a number of main standard Committees, such as the Expenditure Committee and the Public Accounts Committee. My right hon. Friend's Race Relations Committee has established itself as a regular Committee, but whether or not it will become a permanent feature of the House, I am not in a position to judge. Could I consider this matter again and report back to the House?

Mr. English: With permission of the House, may I say—I think I am speaking for the majority of the members of the Committee present—how deeply disappointed we are at the right hon. Gentleman's remarks about direct reporting by sub-committees? He said that if we had put down a motion he would have allowed it to go on the Order Paper in Government time today and therefore to be debated—[HON. MEMBERS:

"Opposition time."] Very well, Opposition time, but anyway, the normal Front Bench time. But the right hon. Gentleman did not tell us that before. Of course we would have put down such a motion. That is a very weak excuse for it not being agreed today.

Mr. Prior: I will make an opportunity on a future occasion for this motion to be put down so that the House may reach a decision.

Mr. English: We are very grateful.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,
That this House takes note of the rôle of the Expenditure Committee, with particular reference to staff broadcasting of proceedings, reporting by Sub-Committees, and other matters contained in the Second Special Report of Session 1970–71, the Sixth Special Report of Session 1971–72, the Second and Fourth Special Reports of the last Session of Parliament and in the Minutes of Evidence taken on 9th April 1973.

CHARLWOOD AND HORLEY BILL

Order for Third Reading read.

9.57 p.m.

The Minister for Local Government and Development (Mr. Graham Page): I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
This Bill has been well debated in its earlier stages, but perhaps in a rather piecemeal fashion as the debates occurred on amendments. It might be as well if I drew the threads together now.
The Bill, in exceptional circumstances, provides for the alteration of the boundaries between the new counties of Surrey and West Sussex. The exceptional circumstances are that an undertaking was given by the Government during the passage of the Bill which became the Local Government Act 1972 to make this alteration of the boundaries if certain events occurred. Those events did occur, but only after the Local Government Act had received the Royal Assent.
That Act drew the county boundary north of Charlwood and Horley so as to include those areas with Gatwick in West Sussex. This Bill draws the county boundary between Charlwood and Horley


to the north and Gatwick to the south, leaving Charlwood and Horley in Surrey apart from some very minor portions of those parishes.
That boundary line has been carefully determined by the local authorities concerned. Charlwood, as now returned to Surrey, will be a new parish within the new district of Mole Valley. Horley, as now returned to Surrey, will be a new parish within the new district of Reigate and Banstead. Under the 1972 Act there was the new parish of Salfords and Sidlow, comprising those parts of Charlwood and Horley left in Surrey by that Act which then could only go into the Mole Valley district. Now, under this Bill, it will join Horley in the Reigate and Banstead district.
As a result of those changes, certain elections will be necessary. To explain those properly, I should first mention that, for parish purposes, Horley comprises three wards. Two are by the Bill moved intact from West Sussex to Surrey, so no new elections there are needed. The third is only partly moved to Surrey, so in that case a new election will be needed.
I should also add that the very small areas of Charlwood and Horley left in West Sussex are added to existing electoral divisions there. They are too small to be separate divisions on their own. The result regarding elections is that there will be parish council elections for Charlwood and for Horley Ward No. 3. There will be district council elections for Horley to the Reigate and Banstead District Council, for Salfords and Sidlow to the Reigate and Banstead District Council—

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE

Ordered,
That the Charlwood and Horley Bill may be proceeded with at this day's Sitting, though opposed, until any hour.—[Mr. Hicks.]

CHARLWOOD AND HORLEY BILL

Question again proposed. That the Bill be now read the Third time.

Mr. Page: —and there will be district council elections for Charlwood to the Mole Valley District Council.
There will be county council elections for Horley and Salfords and Sidlow electoral division to the new Surrey County Council, and for Dorking electoral division, that part of Mole Valley which will include Charlwood, to the new Surrey County Council.
That is the contents of the Bill. I shall not stray from the rules of order to discuss any other boundary changes in the country that might have been included in the Bill. At the earlier stages of the Bill hon. Members said, in effect—indeed, I think they said it in so many words— "Good luck to Charlwood and Horley for getting what they wanted, but why could not other boundary changes be included?" At this stage I invite the House to omit that latter query and to say, "Good luck, Charlwood and Horley", and to give the Bill a Third Reading.

10.1 p.m.

Mr. Michael Cocks: We are grateful to the Government for making time available for this Third Reading debate. As the right hon. Gentleman has just said, the Opposition have a history of support for the Bill on principle. That was made clear on Second Reading by my hon. Friend the Member for Widnes (Mr. Oakes) when he said that basically we welcomed the Bill.
It is true that at earlier stages we said we wished that the Government would give wider application in what they were doing in the Bill to wishes expressed by polls in other areas. But we sincerely congratulate the hon. Member for Dorking (Sir G. Sinclair) on the success that he has had with the Government in persuading them to bring forward the Bill and on getting it to its present stage.
However, as this is the Third Reading of a Hybrid Bill brought forward by the Government, which I understand is a unique occasion, we should say a little about it. On Second Reading my hon.


Friend the Member for Widnes congratulated the Government. He applauded them for bringing forward a Hybrid Bill in order that local issues could be dealt with. As the right hon. Gentleman has said, however, it has been debated only in a piecemeal fashion on amendments. This is a rather unsatisfactory state of affairs in view of the nature of the Bill, because one of the assumptions that we had when we gave the Bill a Second Reading was that there would be very detailed scrutiny by a Select Committee. The rigorous and scruplous examination which we expected by the Select Committee did not take place, so that the House is now being asked to give a Third Reading to a Bill the earlier stages of which have been truncated.
The Bill contains detailed changes of boundaries which affect private interests. That is basically the reason for its hybrid nature. Hon. Members will agree that the Hybrid Bill procedure is complex and is not easy to understand even for Members of Parliament who are supported by not only frequent references to Erskine May but also excellent advice which is freely available from the Clerks of the House.
It is a pity, therefore, that the petitioners to the Select Committee did not have an opportunity to put their case. They did not appreciate that the Secretary of State was waiting or them with a sandbag and that their locus standi could not be established. It was discredited by a QC employed by the Department of the Environment. I am surprised at the answer I have received from the right hon. Gentleman tonight to an inquiry I made about the fee paid to counsel. The Minister said that the fee was inappropriate to the occasion. It is unfortunate that that information has not been given to us and that it should be hushed up at a time when the last penny of the earnings of miners and other people is public knowledge and a subject of public discussion. One wonders what "appropriate" means, whether it means appropriate to a hatchet-man job or simply a representation job.
What was serious about the Select Committee procedure was that, when the locus standi was being discussed and was the subject of a question by a member of the Committee, the Queen's Counsel, Mr. Marnham, said in answer

to points as to whether the people concerned had locus standi, as reported at page 19 of the report of the proceedings:
These … are arguments, I suggest, which should be, and could be, put on the Floor of of the House.
With the best will in the world, as the right hon. Gentleman knows, it is not possible through our procedure to discuss that sort of thing. We have been limited to discussing the Bill on amendments and now on Third Reading. Counsel, no doubt inadvertently, probably misled the Committee about the sort of scrutiny which could take place on Third Reading and in Committee. That was unfortunate.
I welcome the opportunity to place on record our dissatisfaction about the way in which the correct Committee procedure was not allowed to take place.
There is a certain vagueness in Clause 1(2). At one stage the boundary line is said to run
on or near the general line of Horley Road".
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for the speed with which he replied to a query I raised with him very briefly. I apologise if, in my brevity, I did not make the nature of the case clear, so that perhaps he was able to hold out a little more hope than he can now offer. His answer will be forwarded to the person concerned, who will no doubt consider whether to petition in another place if dissatisfied with that answer.
We are a bit concerned about this Hybrid Bill procedure. It is a most unusual thing for the Government to introduce. I certainly ask my hon. Friends to support the Bill's Third Reading, and we have no intention of impeding it, but certain doubts are raised in our minds about the whole matter.
In that connection, I was astonished to have my attention drawn to a letter in the Daily Telegraph of 25th February 1972 written by the Clerk of West Sussex County Council, who made serious allegations about a meeting which was to have been held and which had to be called off because he was told that militant opposition would prevent its taking place. Such a matter draws forth a number of people whose interests are perhaps carried to extremes, and are almost at times idiosyncratic, but for a person of the standing of the Clerk of the West Sussex County Council to write such a letter makes me wish that it had been


possible to give the Bill rather closer scrutiny.
Basically we welcome the Bill. We congratulate the hon. Member for Dorking. We congratulate the Minister on the way he has taken a certain amount of punishment about other areas in the country which we must not mention in this Third Reading debate. However, I am sure that he understands our point about this and we hope that the Bill will have equal success when it reaches another place.

10.10 p.m.

Mr. John Golding: May I add my congratulations to those of my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, South (Mr. Michael Cocks) and also congratulate my hon. Friend on his first appearance at the Dispatch Box. His contribution is worthy of congratulation. In his time in the House he has displayed a wealth of knowledge about local government and we are pleased that in what could be the fag end of a Parliament he has at last reached the position he deserves.
My hon. Friend asked us to support the Bill and it is only for that reason that I shall not oppose it tonight. My opposition would have been because I do not believe the end justifies the means. Quite clearly the means used by the Government to get the Bill to this stage have been questionable to say the least. My hon. Friend referred to the QC who was employed for an undisclosed fee. It is scandalous that that fee is not disclosed. The National Coal Board is spending a great deal of money to advertise the wage offer to the miners and it is most odd that a public servant directly employed by the Government should be able to keep his fee secret in this way. I should have been happy if the fee had been disclosed particularly since I have opposed the Bill because I thought Mr. Best had a reasonable case which he was prevented from putting before the Select Committee.
At an earlier stage we put the case of Mr. Best and expressed our discontent. I am sorry that my hon. Friend, having arrived at the Dispatch Box, has advised us to support the Bill and I shall do so only because of what he said.

10.14 p.m.

Mr. Ted Leadbitter: I rise merely to comment briefly in the customary fashion at the end of reasoned discussion on legislation. I appreciate the Minister's patience and the time he has taken. He is a Minister of some experience. During the long hours of many debates when my party was in power he never displayed any lack of courtesy in the most trying of situations and he has always shown an abundance of patience and care. It is worth taking time to say a few words in that direction. The Minister knows our views because we put them forward forcibly.
I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, South (Mr. Michael Cocks) in the comments he made. The time has come, as it often does in the House of Commons, when the Government must have their Bill.
We have reached that time and I rise merely to accord to the Minister the courtesy which I believe he has earned not just for the first time but on many occasions. It is a good feature, when we are dealing with legislation which arouses differences of opinion, that we can always reach a state of agreement on the way in which we conduct our affairs.

10.15 p.m.

Mr. Graham Page: With the leave of the House, may I thank the hon. Member for the Hartlepools (Mr. Leadbitter) for his kind words. I know how persistent he can be when he wants to make a point. He makes his points very well and very thoroughly. I am grateful to him not only for his kind words but for the brevity of his speech.
It gives me personally great pleasure to see the hon. Member for Bristol, South (Mr. Michael Cocks) at the Dispatch Box. We have known each other across the Floor for a long time. It is a great delight to see him at that Box. I thank him, too, for the way he has received Third Reading. He said that he had hoped there would be detailed scrutiny by the Select Committee. It turned out, in accordance with the Standing Orders of the House, that there was not that scrutiny of the merits of the Bill. However, the Bill was throughly discussed on the Floor of the House and amendments were considered in Committee and on Report. The procedure before the Committee was


entirely within the Standing Orders of the House.
It would have been wrong for my Department not to have briefed counsel, and the best counsel, to put a case. Having taken the Bill that far, it was our duty to brief counsel. It is not the custom to disclose counsel's fees, but I do not see any good point in that custom or convention. I can tell the House that Mr. Marnham's brief fee was £600. It is not unusual in a case of this sort for counsel's brief to be marked at that figure.

Mr. Golding: Will the Minister tell us how many shifts he worked for £600?

Mr. Page: It is an appropriate brief fee. Of course, what counsel may do before the Committee is not all that he does in preparation of the case.
I was unaware of the letter in the Daily Telegraph which was mentioned by the hon. Member for Bristol, South. I am rather surprised at its contents.
The hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Mr. Golding) mentioned Mr. Best, who appeared before the Committee. I add my congratulations on the way he put his case on the points of locus standi. It is a pity that Mr. Best was not able, according to Standing Orders, to go on and put the merits of his case. He deserved a brief fee of £600 just as much as Mr. Marnham. He put his case very well.
I am grateful for the way that Third Reading has been received. I hope that the Bill can go on to another place and that it will get through quickly.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.

INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATIONS (LAND) [MONEY]

Queen's Recommendation having been signified—

Resolved,
That, for the purposes of any Act of the present Session to enable the Secretary of State and the Ministry of Finance for Northern Ireland to acquire land for the service in the United Kingdom of international organisations and institutions, and their offices and agencies, it is expedient to authorise—

(1) the payment out of money provided by Parliament of any increase in the sums payable out of money so provided under any other enactment which is attributable to the provisions of the said Act ; and
(2) the payment into the Consolidated Fund of all sums received by the Secretary of State by virtue of the said Act of the present Session under the Commissioners of Works Act 1852.—[Mr. Parkinson.]

PUBLIC ACCOUNTS

Ordered,
That Mr. John Biggs-Davison and Mrs. Sally Oppenheim be discharged from the Committee of Public Accounts and that Sir John Langford-Holt and Sir John Rodgers be added to the Committee.—[Mr. Weatherill.]

STATUTORY INSTRUMENTS

Ordered,
That Mr. Edward Gardner be discharged from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments and that Mr. Idris Owen be added to the Committee.—[Mr. Weatherill.]

CONSOLIDATION, &c, BILLS

Ordered,
That Mr. Charles Fletcher-Cooke be discharged from the Joint Committee on Consolidation, &amp;c, Bills and that Mr. Ivor Stanbrook be added to the Committee.—[Mr. Weatherill.]

ADJOURNMENT

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Parkinson.]

MEALS ON WHEELS

10.20 p.m.

Mr. Greville Janner: I am happy to have the opportunity to raise the subject of the meals on wheels service. I do so in the knowledge that we have a very brief span in which to deal with a most important topic. At the start I pay tribute to the angels of good cheer who operate the service. Nothing that I say hereafter must be taken in any way as a criticism of those folk. They provide far more than food for the people who are fortunate enough to have the service.
In many cases they provide the only communication that those people have with the outside world, the only communication which is possible for them. They provide life itself and the only means whereby these people are able to remain in their own homes. We have here an arrangement which enables food to be brought by individuals, by those who care, to people who otherwise would be totally isolated. We are accustomed to think of this service as being largely for the elderly but many of its recipients are housebound because they are disabled. For them it is of equal importance.
But for the service, many such people would be institutionalised, would have to go into a home, and that would be a disaster. Many others would die. Those who have need of the service are often people who have lost their spouses and have lost the urge to cook for themselves and who say "What is the difference? A jam sandwich will do for me." In providing food, the meals on wheels service often provides also a desire to live. It gives help, and the help itself provides the means for many of these people to resume a normal life, to resume cooking for themselves and often to give up the need for this service altogether.
So why, if the service is so fine, is it necessary to raise it in the House? Alas, it is limited in its means, in the number of people it reaches, in the days of the

week and the weeks of the year in which it operates, and it is limited by virtue of the isolation of the service which it provides.
Let me deal first with the days of the week. An old or disabled person does not cease to need food because it is a weekend. The service stops not only at weekends but often for much longer periods, for example over Christmas. I have seen elderly people in the Leicester area who are well served by the service during the week but who are desperately lonely at weekends and on Christmas Day. It is then that they need help more than ever. The efforts of Age Concern and other voluntary organisations cannot cope with their needs.
I raised this matter in the House a little while ago and the Minister said, in one of his less inspired moments:
The number of people known to be receiving the service on a seven-days-a-week basis has increased from 1,361 in 1970 to no less than 2,343 in 1971—a rise of nearly 100 per cent."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 6th November 1973 ; Vol. 863, c. 785.]
If he had said that out of the thousands who receive the service there had been a rise of perhaps 50 per cent., I would have been impressed. But a rise from one to two is a rise of 100 per cent. and a rise from 1,000 to 2,000, while acceptable as a start, is pathetic.
I am sure that in his reply the Minister will recognise that this is only a beginning. This is a major defect in the scheme. The service does not operate on sufficient days in the week or enough weeks in the year. It should be operating seven days a week for 52 weeks.
We come to the enormous discrepancy of the service in the areas. For example, in the city of Leicester the service operates five days a week. It is operated in the main by the local authority and by people employed by the local authority who are totally devoted to their work. I pay warm tribute to them. My wife and I have been out with them and seen the way in which they are received and the warmth and affection which they give and receive when they bring food, companionship, good will, laughter and life to the people whom they serve. In the county of Leicester the service operates on two days a week only and is staffed almost entirely by volunteers. Again,


they are tremendous people doing a fine job, but for only two days a week.
We do not know what will happen under the reorganisation. I should like the Minister's assurance that the Government will take every step in their power to ensure that, under the reorganisation, there will not be a levelling-down process which will result in the city of Leicester's service becoming less when it is amalgamated with the pathetically small service operated by the county. It is important that the county service should be built up and that the city service should not be allowed to decline.
The first assurance I should like to have is that the Minister will take all steps within his power to encourage and enable local authorities to extend the service to further days in the week. Secondly, I ask for an assurance that when the Minister is considering the reorganised service he will take all necessary steps to ensure that those services, which are superb within their limits, will not be cut down when they become part of a larger unit. I appeal to the Minister not to use the old excuse that it is a matter for the local authorities to decide what they do. To an extent that is true, but the local authorities have their hands tied by the resources which are available to them and which are in decline.
Thirdly, it is vital not merely to provide meals on wheels for people in their homes so that they can remain there as long as possible, living contentedly in their own surroundings, but also to remove them from those surroundings for their meals wherever possible and to get them into day care centres where they can eat their meals in company and not in isolation. It is often possible to get people out if there is somewhere for them to go, and to get rid of the "hermit" complex that affects elderly people living on their own who never see anyone else. I should like an assurance from the Minister that the Government are aware of this problem and are doing something about it.
I have been told—I hope that the the Minister will be able to deny it—that, as a result of the latest cut-back in expenditure, the first day care centre in the Leicester area is not to be proceeded

with but is to be postponed, and that the plans of the local authorities to open a day centre shortly have had to be shelved, so that the hermit complex is to remain a feature of our society for longer than is necesary. Surely there should be no cut-back in the provision of day care centres.
The plan is to have a centre in which meals are served through a hatch to elderly people who are able to get to the centre, and to provide transport to the centre for those who can benefit from the companionship. Those elderly people would thereby be enabled to lead much more normal lives. From the centre would go out meals on wheels to those who could not get there. The idea is to knit together the system in one fabric.
One needs more than a fleet of vehicles delivering meals. Those who deliver them take far more care and time than the law would require of them in doing their job. They know when their clients are unwell, when to call in a doctor and when help is needed. Alas, they also know when a client dies. All too often those not receiving the service may die without anyone knowing of their death, sometimes for weeks. Parliamentary Questions which I have asked have shown that no one knows how many old people die in their homes without anyone knowing of their departure.
We must get a closely knit system. In Leicester we now have a marvellous new scheme being developed whereby an elderly person who needs help puts a cardboard fish in his window so that a street warden may know that help is required. This operates in part of the city. We also have a system of warning lights which, despite all our efforts, the Government have refused to make compulsory. Such warning lights operate in many old people's dwellings. All this is part of a detailed system of concern of which the meals on wheels service is a very important section. But it should not be allowed to operate on its own. We have a start with the system. It must be expanded.
I hope that the Minister will give an indication of the number of people who are now receiving meals and of the number who it is intended will receive them. We should also welcome the hon. Gentleman's assurance that the importance of the scheme is appreciated by the Government.
I hope that the hon. Gentleman will join me in expressing appreciation to those who operate this scheme—not only those who send out meals but those who cook them, not only those who deal with patients but also those very patient people working at the Hill Crest Hospital in Leicester and in the school meals service who put in a great deal of extra time to see that the meals on wheels services are provided. I hope the hon. Gentleman will indicate that the scheme will be extended and will form part of other schemes.
I hope, too, that the Minister will assure us that in the reorganised service areas such as the city of Leicester will not be levelled down to meet the needs of other areas not so well served and that in the cut-backs ordered by the Government the day care centres will not be allowed to disappear into a sad limbo.
This is a problem involving hundreds of thousands of people who receive the service, others on waiting lists and others still for whom the service is inadequate. I trust that the Government will put their full weight into extending the service as such, both on its own and in conjunction with the other services so badly needed by the elderly and the disabled.

10.33 p.m.

The Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Security (Mr. Michael Alison): I am glad that the hon. and learned Member for Leicester, Northwest (Mr. Greville Janner) has given us an opportunity to discuss meals on wheels. As he said, it is a service of great importance to many elderly and handicapped people both in the cities and outside them. I welcome especially the opportunity to pay tribute to the many thousands of volunteers, notably members of the WRVS, who give their time so generously. I cannot overemphasise the debt that we owe to the thousands of volunteers on whom meals on wheels services in most areas of the country continue to rely. Volunteers were entirely responsible for or made a significant contribution towards the provision of nearly 11 million of the 18 million meals on wheels served last

year. In most cases they contribute their services free or merely claim out-of-pocket expenses. Without them the cost of meals on wheels would be considerably increased.
The hon. and learned Gentleman has spoken of the need for continuing expansion and improvement of the meals on wheels service. I do not dispute this. For the sake of perspective, however, I make no apology for setting out some brief facts and figures to show what remarkable progress the service has made over the past 20 years.
Surprisingly, interest in a really large-scale expansion of the service is of comparatively recent origin. Until 1961 local authorities had no powers of their own to provide meals to old people, though they were empowered by Section 31 of the National Assistance Act 1948 to contribute to the costs of voluntary organisations which provided such meals. As an indication of the scale of the service, before Section 31 was amended to give local authorities a direct power to provide meals services a survey by Miss Amelia Harris showed that in 1958 some 20,000 people throughout Great Britain were receiving about 1½ million meals on wheels a year. Contrast that with the 18 million to which I referred earlier.
It is interesting to note some of the more detailed findings of the Harris survey. In 1958, for example, more than four out of five recipients received only one or two meals a week and only 4 per cent. received five or more meals. Only 21 individual people—or one in 1,000 recipients—received a meal on all seven days of the week.
While two-thirds of the schemes surveyed by Amelia Harris provided a service throughout the year, one-quarter of schemes closed down entirely for at least five weeks in the year, and sometimes much more. Even at this level of provision, almost two-thirds of the recipients of meals on wheels said that they had at least one good meal every day of the week, and a much higher proportion managed to get satisfactory meals at weekends, particularly Sunday.
Among a random sample of non-recipients the 1958 survey showed that 95 per cent. got at least one good meal a day, with no significant difference


between the proportions of men and women or between the different age groups concerned.
The conclusion drawn from the survey at the time was that the overall need was to expand the service to provide 40,000 recipients with some 6 million meals a year.
Not long after that survey report was published, local authorities were first empowered by the terms of the National Assistance Act 1948 (Amendment) Act 1962 to provide meals to old people either directly for the first time themselves or through voluntary agencies as heretofore. Since then the meals on wheels service has grown steadily, and in the past year or so literally spectacularly, so that in England alone in the year ended March 1973 about 135,000 recipients received over 18 million meals in their own homes. I think that was the figure for which the hon. and learned Gentleman was asking.
In addition, a substantial number of people enjoyed a total of about 10 million meals served in clubs or centres. Despite all the difficulties caused by inflation, staff shortages, vehicle shortages and other shortfalls in resources, local authorities, with magnificent support in most cases from voluntary organisations, achieved a remarkable expansion of the service between 1971 and 1972. Not only did the number of recipients of meals on wheels increase by 13 per cent.—no small increase on a figure of over 100,000 recipients—but the average number of meals served per week increased still more. Over the same period there was a 19·4 per cent. increase in the number of meals provided in clubs and centres. The hon. and learned Gentleman, with his special emphasis on the value of these centres, will know the even higher rate of increase of meals provided there.
I recognise, however, that there is no room for complacency. Though the proportion of recipients receiving fewer than three meals on wheels a week has dropped from 67 per cent. in 1968 to 59 per cent. in 1972, there is still a long way to go before we achieve a five-day service in all areas.
In 1972, 18 per cent. of recipients—24,000 people—received five or more meals on wheels a week and 23 per cent. received three or four meals a week. What is not reliably known from available

national statistics is the number requiring but not receiving meals on wheels, and the number of meals on wheels recipients who received reliable help with meals from other sources—for example, the home help service, attendance at a day centre or lunch club, family, neighbours, or on their own initiative—on days of the week when meals on wheels are not provided.
A survey of meals on wheels recipients in 1972 in Nottingham, a city not far from Leicester, showed, however, that nearly half the people interviewed did not wish to have any more meals each week even though most received meals only two days a week. A special analysis of those requiring more meals a week suggests that perhaps one-third of existing recipients of a two-days-a-week service in Nottingham might wish to have three or more additional meals a week, though a much smaller proportion—2½ per cent. of all recipients in the city-would have welcomed a six- or seven-day service.
The Department's figures for the country as a whole for a sample week in November 1972 show that just under 4,000 people received six or seven meals on wheels in that week, of whom almost 2,500 lived in Greater London and 1,300 in Liverpool and Manchester. In addition, over 11,000 meals were provided in the sample week in clubs or centres open on six or seven days of the week, including nearly 4,500 in Greater London, 1,500 in Hull, 1,000 in Liverpool and 1,700 in Cheshire. It may be true that reasonably large-scale daily meals services are found only in a few areas of the country at present, but so far the main emphasis has been to seek first to build, as resources allow, towards a regular five-day service for all who need it.
Even this goal is not without its difficulties. It is not easy in all areas to find staff or volunteer helpers who are able or willing to prepare or deliver meals on a shift rota basis which includes regular weekend working. Nor is it always easy to find conveniently sited premises where suitable meals can be prepared every day of the week without a break. In some areas the service can be run only as a paid service, though in other places there are tangible advantages in organising a service of this kind in a


way which mobilises all available resources of the local community. No two areas are exactly alike. No single solution is right for all areas, and it is unlikely that a uniform need exists for all areas to expand services at the same uniform rate.
It would also be unrealistic of me if I did not add that for many authorities the resource costs of early implementation of a five-, six- or seven-day meals service wherever it was thought necessary could be met only at the expense of cutting back other services of equal or possibly greater priority. Given the shortfall of resources to meet total demand for local authority services—the hon. and learned Gentleman will know only too vividly from his experience in Leicester how many calls there on the personal social and health services provided by local authorities—there will always be scope for differences between authorities in the assessment of relative priority needs for their area.
Some authorities have clearly wished to give particular priority to ensuring a seven-day meals service, possibly for a limited number of recipients, and perhaps at the expense of other services for which there is a pressing need. Others have preferred to use additional resources for meals services to increase the number of recipients, or provide more club or centre meals, before turning their minds to the possibility of increasing the number of days of service. Yet others have been unable to expand their service more than marginally because of physical limitations of personnel, premises or equipment. In other words, there is a whole range of variations and permutations of the possible ways in which resources can be applied to this need.
I know it is not popular to discuss considerations of hard cash, but we must face the fact that the meals on wheels service costs money—over £3 million in England in 1972–73—and every increase in expenditure on the service must be weighed against the alternatives forgone.
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State is deeply concerned that this vital domiciliary and community service should grow. With that in view, first he has to ensure that the continuing need to expand meals services in most areas is not overlooked when the total of relevant

expenditure used in calculating rate support grant is being considered.
Before last month's announcement by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer of a 10 per cent. reduction of expenditure on goods and services within public expenditure, provisional planning for meals services had been on the basis that local authority expenditure on meals was currently rising at a rate of about 15 per cent. a year. The consequences for local authority social services of the recent announcement on public expenditure are still to be worked out, and, of course, within the agreed total expenditure local authorities will determine their own priorities for local development of particular services. This is an unavoidable and, I believe, proper concomitant of local government reorganisation.
The hon. and learned Gentleman must not overstress the Government's power to direct local authorities, particularly the new and larger authorities, to do exactly as the Government would wish. But there is little doubt that the local authorities will be less willing to effect reductions in expenditure on personal social services than on many others of their services, so that we can reasonably expect them to continue to operate the meals on wheels service at least at the present level.
Second, we have provided local authorities with a tentative guideline figure for long-term indicative planning of the meals on wheels services. This is a power to influence which we have and use. It envisages 200 meals per week per thousand of the population over the age of 65. That is more than twice the existing national average provision but less than existing provision in some parts of London and in one or two other places.
The guideline is based on the evidence of a number of large-scale surveys of need among elderly people but takes no account of the possible development of alternative ways of supplying hot main meals to people who need them or of variations in need between different types of area. For planning purposes no distinction is drawn in the guidelines between home meals and club or centre meals since we would hope that, where-ever it was practicable, local authorities would seek to provide required meals either regularly or occasionally in the social setting of a club or centre.
Third, we are trying to assist local authorities by developing a programme of research studies to provide answers to the short-term and longer-term practical problems of providing adequate meals wherever and whenever they may be needed. Thus, a firm of management consultants recently undertook a study of 33 existing meals on wheels services in order to see how existing resources used within the service might be applied more effectively so as to enable bottlenecks to be overcome and expansion sustained whether or not additional resources can be made available. The report of this study was circulated to all social service authorities and relevant voluntary organisations last October and provides a most informative comparative analysis between different kinds of service and some very useful guidance on how time and manpower constraints on the service could be tackled. We are also involved in research

into the nutritional needs and situation of elderly people as reflected in the recent report on the last Nutrition Survey of the Elderly.
I hope that what I have said has demonstrated the Government's deep concern to develop organised meals services for elderly and handicapped people within the context of expanding the key domiciliary care services which are so vital to the continuing independence and well-being of these groups. Much has been achieved in a relatively short while. Much remains to be done. But we confidently expect the encouraging trends of the recent past to continue, and indeed improve, as the economic situation improves.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at eleven minutes to Eleven o'clock.